Financial Services Client & The Project Foundry
Technical Governance Services for the Financial Sector.
The Project Foundry has a significant success record in designing, testing, and delivering service solutions based on industry best practice, and deploying people from various competency teams.
Our client is a market leading consumer finance business, third party loan servicer and asset manager with over €36bn in assets under management.
Headquartered in Australia, the client also has operations in the UK, Spain, South Korea.
The Challenge
The client had a vast dispersed hybrid network, spanning multiple sites with no central management or monitoring, including on-premise and cloud implementations. This led to unplanned downtime, increased management overhead, complexity & risk.
There was insufficient centralised ticketing & change management process or solution. Although a help desk solution was in place, it wasn’t being utilised to its full potential. Change release was not overseen nor managed, leading to unplanned or unseen changes caused by shadow IT.
Insufficient documentation, both design and architectural, increased remediation time exponentially due to full discoveries being required for every incident.
This was accelerated by on boarding of new onsite IT teams, who inherited the above issues while being inundated with ad hoc issues and incidents daily. This allowed no time for governance or future planning,
The Solution
A full site survey was performed across the hybrid environment.
A remediation plan was then created to address points of concern within the environment to align it with the vendor’s best practice.
The client’s team was brought onboard during the remediation to increase their understanding and knowledge of the site, and team members were nominated to become SME’s in their respective areas.
A detailed documentation library was created for the design and architectural layout based on the remediation and its discovery.
Following on from remediation, we completed a baseline review across all applications and infrastructure. The baseline highlighted multiple areas where the software and hardware were not at a level within the vendor support matrix. This was broken into multiple mini projects based on dependencies and updates/firmware were applied where required to bring the estate to a consistent vendor-supported level.
We are now building out a transformational body of work to improve the availability, performance and scalability of the infrastructure and applications. This is managed by running departmental workshops to understand the business requirements and expectations for the application the consume.
This is added into a matrix against the vendors best practice, to which we draw up an agreed change plan to implement the improvements.
As part of the solution, we introduced a technical governance service to run the change approvals board to help reduce risk and ensure documentation is updated in line with changes. While also overseeing vendor management to ensure it aligns with industry practices and client requirements.
Incident management is a key component in which we oversee and manage critical incidents from the client’s team. This supplemented this with the required resources on an ad hoc basis, whilst managing third party vendors related to the incidents through to resolution stage.
We have quarterly reviews to deliver a “lessons learned” session, while using the forum to discuss future plans and industry trends that may ultimately benefit the client, and set up POC’s where required to future proof the client’s technical estate. We create upgrade roadmaps and retire legacy systems as part of the quarterly service, to improve productivity and reduce risk.
The Benefits
The service setup and provided by The Project Foundry address the specific needs of our client:
- Improved resilience and reliability (unplanned incidents reduced by 80%)
- Lowered IT Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
- A centralised ticketing and document management system
- Weekly change meetings
- Higher knowledge retention and reduced knowledge gaps
- Higher customer satisfaction levels
- Improved business productivity due to improvements in the technology stack
- Improved management due to centralised control of the Hybrid multi cloud environment
- KPI tracking and reporting due to monitoring and dashboards
- An SLA driven service underpinned by ITIL® aligned processes.
- Service management information with service improvement programme