A Top 5 Canadian Financial Group with a large presence in US needed to modernize servicing across its branch network to improve customer experience and begin appealing to a younger demographic (including Millennials). Additionally, the technology infrastructure utilized by back-office operations to support customer servicing was at the end of life.

Changes in scope for the initiative impacted USD600B/year in customer transactions and over 40 applications.

The Executive Leadership team was not fully aligned on the scope of the initiative, nor a clear executive leader was appointed. The client required Delivery Leaders that would: 

• Create alignment amongst the executive team on the scope of the initiative;
• Guide the development of a strong business case and provide support during its justification and approval process, which include its board of directors; and
• Manage end-to-end the delivery of this mid-8-figures investment, ensuring the business case objectives were met

Valstroom Actions

1. Identified and engaged the key executives of the impacted areas to ensure alignment on the project scope and business case.
2. Engaged a team of process experts to evaluate all branch service processes, which involved over 200 different transaction types.
3. Gained executive alignment on the critical processes in scope for the modernization effort, developed a business case, and supported the initiative executive sponsor in securing board approval.
4. Developed and implemented a strong program governance with clear roles and accountabilities from the initiative executive sponsor and Steering Committee to project delivery leads and team members.
5. Guided the project delivery team in the development of the most optimal release scheduled that maximized the run-rate savings identified in the business case.
6. Provided leadership to the project teams on the integration of several interdependent workstreams that adopted different methodologies (incl. Waterfall and Agile).
7. Managed the overall delivery from inception to the completion of the last release.
8. Coached and supported Senior Project Managers in resolving schedule dependencies, conflicts, and escalating risks and issues to the executive team.

Results

The initiative was delivered on time and to budget, achieving all of its business case objectives, including the multi-million dollars target run-rate savings, revenue generation, and Return on Investment (ROI)

Over 4,500 new digital devices were implemented across the a branch network that was dispersed 8 different states, resulting in improved customer experience and a 75% reduction in branch write-offs

90% of the paper tickets utilized by the branches that required customers to manually complete were completely eliminated 

Branch survey results indicated 91% of tellers felt confident utilizing the newly implemented digital devices and processes after 2 weeks from implementation, with over 55% indicating the optimized processes led to longer and higher quality customer conversations

Initiative became a “poster-child” for delivery quality, receiving outstanding feedback from the executive team as an example of how complex initiatives must be managed in the future

The client immediately engaged the delivery leader to drive the development of business cases for future initiatives.