Wealth Management Pension Tech Systems Integration
Designing the merger of two pension and investment back office systems into one.
The Pickle
Our client, the retail investment division of a top-three management consultancy, was engaged to assist its end-client, a top-ten UK wealth manager.
The end-client wanted to merge the functionality and assets of two pre-existing asset servicing and portfolio administration ‘back end’ databases into one.
Our client had a problem with this as they lacked internal specialist project resources with sufficient know-how to deliver the work.
The client and end-client instead were relying on graduate and less-experienced consultants to do the work, something which was found to be sub-optimal.
Our Move
Measuring
Arriving on the project, it became clear to us that the project was being driven by purely project management metrics.
This had some merit but the net effect was that the end-client was paying more attention to project planning measurement and less focus was being applied to delivery.
The end-client hadn’t nailed down requirements, carried out operating model analysis nor answered core business architecture domain questions.
Documenting
Working with our client and the end-client, we sought to provide greater clarity over business and technical requirements, target operating model and business architecture.
We brought certainty by drafting and supporting the project team with new, clearer documents and information in project artefacts.
Deciding
Against our advice (and the advice of our client), the end-client decided to pursue the direction proposed by the internal project management consultancy.
Decision-making was stymied for a while by the predominance given to the metrics of the internal project managers over the needs of the subject-matter experts and workstream leads.
But this imbalance was eventually resolved and the project was able to continue, much delayed and at greater cost to the end-client.
The Result
The end-client merged the two disparate back-end databases and has gone on to acquire new businesses and add these to the underlying platform successfully.