Scope Definition and Project Planning

October 22, 2018 |

To transform a legacy commercial loan origination process, the first step is to support executive leadership in initial scoping and project definition efforts. Thus, in diligent on-site discussions with Fulton Financial stakeholders, we crafted an approach that maintained sufficient rigor and met time constraints mandated by the bank’s board of directors. The accelerated schedule had to accomplish

  • facilitation of large stakeholder workshops to inform current and future-state processes and architecture
  • follow-on workshops to capture and refine business requirements
  • strong IT engagement in creation of detailed solution architecture and interface control documentation

The end goal was to give business users a voice in a technical solution that included a commercial off-the-shelf solution (COTS) and potential custom solutions to supplement out-of-the-box functionality.

With mutual agreement on an approved project approach, planning of stakeholder workshops began.

Capturing the Current State

All-day, multi-week workshops provided numerous opportunities to walk through the current commercial loan origination process, learn about pain points, and build a mindset of cross-departmental cooperation — a crucial factor in the success of this enterprise solution.

Systems Flow ensured the workshops ran smoothly day after day, from room setup and breakdown to effective conversation, time management, and decision-making. Participant feedback was overwhelmingly positive — energizing the team to move on to future-state definition.

Envisioning a Future State

With the current-state process sufficiently documented with system context diagrams and activity diagrams, the team turned to designing the ideal future-state process. To understand the various desires and improvement needs, listening sessions were arranged with dozens of stakeholders spread across the commercial lending line of business.

Again, we were an integral partner in planning and scheduling, working closely with project leadership to tailor session cadence to expectations and obtain maximum project benefit. Whether a large on-site discussion or a small web-based teleconference, we ensured efficient use of everyone’s time and provided management with visibility into team resource capacity.

Weeks were spent documenting desired business process improvements, resulting in a comprehensive Future-State End-to-End Process, that included future-state system context diagrams, activity diagrams, and process narratives. The resulting process document contained the overarching vision for the project’s end-state and informed the next step: Gathering business requirements.

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