Nationwide Insurance DevOps Case Study: Accelerating Delivery with the DevOps Handbook

Nationwide Insurance, a U.S. insurer ranked #68 in the 2017 Fortune 500 with $40,074.1 million in revenue, is highlighted as a high‑performing DevOps organization.

The company is featured as a case study in the DevOps Handbook and regularly presents at DevOpsDays and other industry events, sharing its experiences and tooling choices.

At the November 2017 San Francisco DevOps Enterprise Summit, the team delivered a talk titled “DevOps Handbook Experiments in Accelerating Delivery – Nationwide,” which this article transcribes from the original video (available on Tencent Video).

The presentation uses a climbing‑the‑mount‑Everest metaphor, dividing DevOps adoption into three stages—Base Camp, North‑Slope Camp, and Summit—providing a visual guide for new teams.

Nationwide’s IT organization is massive: over 5,100 staff, more than 2,600 developers and testers, and 200+ product‑development teams serving 23 business units. The structure includes an I&O core, shared‑service teams, and a governance group of CIO‑level stakeholders.

The DevOps journey is traced year by year: 2015 (simplify with a “DevOps Cabin”), 2016 (organizational alignment), 2017 (double‑mode experiments focusing on developer experience), and 2018 (scaling tools, adopting SRE, treating pipelines as products).

Key improvements in developer experience include replacing manual UrbanCode clicks with a chat‑bot that triggers deployments, adopting Rocket.Chat for communication, and consolidating tooling so developers spend most of their time coding and reviewing pull requests.

The primary metric guiding all work is “lead time” (前置时间), chosen because it is understandable across 200+ agile teams, encourages creativity in reduction strategies, and can be measured daily while supporting zero‑downtime deployments.

The support model consists of a DevOps Leadership Team (including Cindy and Jim), a platform team that builds reusable APIs, a governance team that participates in experiments, immersion‑pairing for low‑maturity teams, and monthly DevOps dojo sessions.

A notable success story occurred during Hurricane Harvey in 2017: the claims process for flood‑related vehicle insurance was streamlined from a 90‑day cycle to a same‑day deployment, reducing 40% of unnecessary steps and delivering the change within eight hours.

The article concludes that Nationwide’s large‑scale, metric‑driven, and culturally‑aligned DevOps practice offers valuable lessons for other enterprises seeking similar acceleration and reliability.