Business analysis and project management support for a financial services firm
Client
Industry: Financial Services
Revenue: €12 Million
Employees: 45
Location: Austria
Project
Integration of subsidiary bookkeeping operations into the corporate system
Automation of the conversion and reporting process
Objectives
Analyze the business processes and the local regulation of the subsidiary
Clarify the relationship between business and IT functions
Optimize the level of integration between operational and accounting staff and systems
Prepare business data for the automated conversion into the corporate accounting software
Challenges
Fix the distrust of the accounting team, which saw its whole way of working change
Identify process improvements for time and resource saving; conduct the change
Reconcile local business specifics with the corporate core framework
Run the missing preparatory gap analysis between start and target situation
Past difficulties and postponements caused high opposition to this project; there was a need for a highly diplomatic and competent approach to make the project succeed.
Solution
Due to the critical project status and the high opposition amongst staff and managers, it was necessary to get work done at the human level as well as on the technical side, sometimes by analyzing entire Excel sheets with accounting events.
Past difficulties led to missing resources, so a global approach as a project manager was needed.
More specifically, I:
analyzed the project context;
ran a business and technical gap analysis and identified changes by preserving the existing identity and culture of the subsidiary;
proposed a new plan to include all the constraints;
acted as an interface between operational, accounting, and IT functions, at the local and the corporate level, in order to convert the business requirements into technical solutions and the technical feedback into business impacts;
designed technical solutions for process improvements and validated the development after the programming; and
developed SQL scripts to prepare the data for the initialization of the new accounting process.
Results
I successfully fulfilled the mission, and the project finally landed a few months later.
As a consequence of my interface role and my comprehensive approach to the issues, some long-time issues were eventually fixed, and the time-to-solution accelerated.
The solutions I designed secured the business processes and the conversion to accounting operations, and made it easier for the users to achieve their tasks.
The initialization scripts I developed contributed massively to an error-free migration to the corporate system.
Key Success Factors
Excellent understanding of the business and accounting operations as well as the regulatory framework
Constant endeavor and exchanges between the stakeholders to make operations, accounting, and IT reach agreements
Awareness of the cultural and linguistic gaps and an ability to close them
Fast understanding of the desktop software to propose and design improvements
Experience with and quick understanding of the financing and accounting business, which brings credibility as an IT person among the business and accounting functions
Excellent skills in Transact-SQL to quickly develop the migration scripts