Large Canadian Chartered Bank

Pcubed created a highly efficient Global Operations organization and delivery system.

The Client

Headquartered in Toronto, this client is Canada's fifth largest chartered bank, providing a full range of financial products and services to almost 11 million individual, corporate and institutional clients.

The Challenge

In November 2002, Technology & Operations undertook an operations re-engineering program. The program consisted of nineteen separate projects that were aligned to Global Operations. Each project involved the redesign of existing processes, the introduction of new technology, the realignment of people to functions, or some combination of these three elements.

Other key challenges included:

The program was designed to improve the way Global Operations delivered its services to clients and business partners, as well as enhancing the technology that supports it. The program defines Global Operations' strategy, including its impact on related areas of the technology strategy by:

• Examining ways of improving service quality for each of the business lines that are supported
• Ensuring that controls are maintained or improved
• Delivering services in the most efficient, cost effective way possible

These were also important issues the bank has to address for the success of its Global Operations.

The Pcubed Solution

Pcubed supported the delivery of the program by providing the following four roles : Head of Delivery PMO, Plan Managers, Release Plan Managers and Issues & Risks Manager.

The first major task was to finalize the scope of work for the remaining part of the program. To support the decision making, Pcubed facilitated the migration of the program projects away from a difficult-to-manage Excel wish list toward a precise two-year timeline tied to an overall budget.

The agreed scope was organized into Releases, and categorized into Technology-related projects, Process Reengineering projects and Strategic Organizational change projects. The established timeline was supported by a high-level integrated project plan representing the execution of the agreed nineteen projects.

Throughout the length of our relationship with the program, Pcubed played a predominant role in designing and maintaining diverse program governance structures, specifically:

• The 'Streams & Components' document, a matrix-style program organizational chart that allowed us to standardize and improve process and increase ownership
• A Program Governance Structure diagram which highlighted the diverse steering committees and escalation process
• A Plan Breakdown Structure, a visual representation mapping all program initiatives and projects to their relevant stream, to consolidate all the projects into one integrated picture
• A Delivery Map was used to illustrate the final solution from a technology perspective
• A Plan Release Manager to help organize and manage each project release. Key elements of the solution included:
• The 'Center of Excellence' offered lessons learned to members of the various service teams as an effort to always improve the program delivery
• Increased visibility and accountability at all program levels at a quick glance through an executive dashboard
• Overall administration of the toolset for facilitating resolution and increase program-wide communication
• The design and maintenance of required coding of the project plans for inter-plan dependencies management

The program is credited with saving the bank over $70 million per year. Pcubed helped the Client to realize the following significant business values:

• Ability to anticipate issues, bottlenecks and critical dependencies
• Deliver an extremely tight timeline and complex challenges on target
• Providing timely, accurate and detailed information globally
• Proactive approach to change management : set achievable program goals
• Successful repeatable delivery model of release management