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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