We provided PMO Support to a global bank migrating multiple entities to a common settlement platform.
The Situation
A large global bank, headquartered in the U.S. decided to migrate several legal entities that cleared with different back office systems into a single street-facing entity with a common settlement processing architecture.
In order to effectively manage the multi-entity, multi-year effort, they set up a Program Management Office (PMO) to help coordinate and track activities across entity “delivery streams” and functional project teams.
Satori Consulting was engaged to provide support to the existing PMO team. The PMO faced several immediate challenges. First, the governance structure was a matrixed organization consisting of a PMO managing 11 functional project teams and 4 delivery streams. The structure created weekly redundancies in status meetings and reports. Additionally, communication gaps existed between the functional teams who focused internally and the delivery stream leaders who were interested in all functions but only for their particular entity. Finally, there were deliverables such as the target operating model and conversion strategy required input from all teams, but needed a single leader to drive them to completion
The Satori Solution
Satori worked with the existing PMO team to develop a streamlined reporting process. We facilitated and documented discussions around conversion strategy approaches. By documenting each discussion and providing follow up support between meetings, we helped the client team focus on three preferred alternatives. We helped document pros and cons to each and finally facilitated evaluation and comparison of the alternatives in order to arrive at collective agreement of the best alternative.
To develop the target operating models (TOMs), we met with each of the 11 teams and introduced a common template that each team was responsible for completing and owning. The template provided enough structure to ensure consistency of detail across all teams, while allowing the team leads to still own the final output.
Satori fostered open and candid interim assessment discussions regarding what was working and what was not, to ensure lessons learned in each phase of the project were documented and applied to the next phase of the project.
The Results
Our support and involvement on the PMO team resulted in timely and more efficient weekly status reporting; higher quality program level deliverables; ongoing application of lessons learned, and improved communications between PMO and project teams.