Recovering a complex finance workstream

The finance workstream had actively disengaged from the programme and had no visibility of the solution or the impacts of the transformation on finance. If that position continued, then there was a significant risk that finance would be unable to complete its reporting requirements internally or its external compliance reporting to its regulatory body and to the tax office. The business had recently completed an exercise with the regulator to confirm that the quality of its reporting would improve and that position could have been significantly undermined without a clear solution and understanding of the finance transformation required.

Additionally, the lack of understanding of the new platform and how it operated placed risk around liquidity forecasting and the operation of key finance processes. Liquidity is a key part of operating a regulated business and any failure in this area would have significant consequences for the business, and its clients.

The migration onto the new platform was in 4 separate releases and the first release was critical to building a scalable solution for the future releases as well as leveraging the richer data granularity available from the new platform to support insight and analysis. The lack of engagement from Finance meant that opportunities to improve processes and reporting had not yet been identified and there was limited scope to now include those within build and test cycles. That may have left finance unable to meet its own finance transformation agenda, create technical debt via the introduction of manual processes, and compounding further any reporting risks.

The client had no plan of activity for the finance workstream, no resource plan, no clear solution and no change management approach.

The initial phase was to perform discovery activity, reviewing any existing project collateral and via ‘interviews’ with key SME’s, stakeholders and Exec’s. This allowed the identification of solution, resource and implementation gaps and prioritisation of these.

The plan for the workstream and key deliverables were agreed with the CFO and Programme Director, including the agreement of resource required to achieve the delivery required. Resource was then recruited and onboarded to support solution design, readiness and testing.

Key to the delivery was to ensure that the key part of the solution, the build of a sub-ledger to capture all the financial transactions from the platform was in scope for build and could be delivered pre-migration. That required management of both internal and external suppliers to determine the solution and deliver it in a 3-month timeframe. The platform supplier was particularly difficult to manage, with any scope changes, even when agreed, having unclear delivery timelines.

Once the solution was determined and being delivered the next key element was to rectify the lack of engagement from the finance team. A standard approach of identifying where change was occurring through as-is/ to-be process mapping, understanding end reporting requirements, operating model review and resistance mapping was utilised. The original target date for the migration meant that this activity had to be completed in under 3 months at a time when finance was engaged in year-end reporting and regulatory enquiries around reporting quality.

From that change impact assessment, a readiness and communications plan was developed, covering the documenting of standard operating procedures, development of training material, delivery of training, operating model for a ‘soft launch’, cutover plan and post-migration support model. These were agreed with the Finance team and were aligned with wider Programme plans.

Finance was an outlier in the overall Programme delivery due to the lack of engagement and was perceived as a blocker to the overall success of the first migration. The introduction of governance and structure to the workstream allowed it to be integrated back into wider plans and reporting to ExCo. I joined the programme leadership team, and this allowed me to continue to build the confidence in delivery.

The new platform provides the capacity for growth and the foundation for the remaining migrations. The delivery of the change provided advisers and customers an improved user interface, enriched functionality and greater flexibility around the products they hold.

For Finance, the key benefits were the creation of a new sub-ledger within the client data lake, capturing all platform transactions and automatically consolidating these for consumption into the core financial systems. This has provided greater accuracy in internal, regulatory and financial reporting as well as providing greater insight into performance. The client has been able to successfully complete monthly and quarterly reporting post-migration.

Finance operational processes have also benefitted from the new platform, again leveraging the more granular data and internal reporting tools to provide greater insight and more accurate reporting. A significant number of processes were previously manual and required significant data manipulation in excel. The solution has enabled the upskilling of resource and capacity to do higher value activities.

Although there were operational issues with the platform post-migration, the finance team were not impacted and the greater visibility of activity allowed them to support the wider business in identifying and resolving issues, highlighting the importance of their engagement in future development and migrations.

Finance now has a solution and operating model that enables them to easily scale for future migrations with minimal impact to resource levels or processes. The solution also enables them to continue with their wider finance transformation agenda as it has been delivered agnostic of any ERP that may be in place.

From a Programme perspective, Finance have been re-integrated back into the delivery. The introduction of workstream governance and the experience that I brought built confidence around the delivery. Ultimately it brought the finance workstream to the position where it could positively support the first migration ahead of other more established workstreams. Finance is now established as a key part of future releases and now understand the importance of that engagement.

Project One value Add:

• Depth of experience in the platform solution and delivery of change within Finance

• Ability to quickly identify key drivers to successfully recovering the workstream delivery

• Integrate seamlessly and work as part of the team

• Adapt to new environments and challenges quickly

• Build strong relationships across all stakeholders, regardless of role or seniority

• “Safe pair of hands”, providing confidence to the executive team that delivery was controlled and would be achieved

• Delivered the capability to scale the finance function for future growth.