A global bank

Project Purpose

This project was conducted for the Global Transaction Banking (GTB) division of a global bank. The Bank had experienced significant financial losses due to failed IT payments projects and felt that their IT function was not delivering as much business value as it should. Icon Solutions was engaged to review their delivery of IT systems and help implement improvements. The business wanted better value for money from IT and a reduced risk of further expensive IT project failures.

Brief Description

Icon Solutions conducted a review of the way the IT function delivered systems for GTB. We determined the key organisational and process issues and identified the root causes behind each. One of the key successes of this review was to establish the clear business case for improvements in the management of system requirements. We went on to recommend improvements to their requirements management processes. We delivered a set of requirements management artefact templates to support the improved processes.

In partnership with Ivar Jacobson International we delivered training and mentoring in requirements management to their business analysts. We supported classroom training by joint working on their analysis teams to help embed the new ways of working. These analysis teams were defining the requirements for changes to the Bank's payments systems in response to regulatory changes.

The Bank's payments systems were mission critical. They were complex and extensive, both functionally and architecturally. The analysis teams worked under considerable and mounting pressure. As well as needing to accommodate regulatory changes, the business demanded progress in a number of strategic initiatives to reduce costs and improve customer service. The IT function had to deliver in the order of £50m of improvements annually to their payments related systems.

The Bank is now seeking to adopt our requirements management approach and methods more widely across the bank.

Key Products & Services

The work on this project drew extensively on Icon Solutions' IT Performance Improvement service offering.

Business Benefits of Project

As a result of our work, GTB improved management of systems requirement. This reduced the system delivery risk from requirements being missed or misunderstood. It also started to reduce development re-work due to errors in understanding of the correct baselines and versions of requirements to use.

The improvement in the management of requirements also started to improve IT's relationship to the business. The link between the documented requirements and the real business need started to become clearer.