The increased in external delivery of support services, software solutions and consultancy services present tremendous risk, as well as rewards. Different knowledge bases, cultures, priorities and skill sets must be understood and bridged.
We appreciate the level of translation required and the opportunities for misunderstanding and conflict. Our background and experience enable us to perform vendor selection, support buy vs. build analysis and negotiate agreements on a one-off or ongoing basis. We have also performed roles advising on bids and service offerings by vendors.
The delivery of services also requires considerable management. In supporting delivery, we can reduce clients' management overhead, as well as reducing cost and risk. Whether providing subject matter experts to plug knowledge gaps, project managers to perform quality assurance or business analysts to support testing, we can bring objectivity while retaining customer focus.
For example...
Software vendors, IT outsourcing firms and consultancies often conduct system testing prior to delivery to the client. Testers should be used for their skills; users, for their knowledge. If software is obviously flawed, the original test is worthless. The "scarce resource", the user, is often called upon to do too much, without the proper skills, increasing effort, risk and management overhead to both the project and the user's "real" job.
Proper understanding, planning and control can prevent this occurrence. By supporting and managing the proposal process, defining requirements and acceptance criteria, and performing and reviewing testing, we are able to reduce costs and improve delivery time, to the benefit of both parties.
When the worst happens, we are experienced at taking stalled projects from restart to delivery, identifying critical issues and managing the client/vendor relationship to ensure a successful outcome.
Illustrative projects
Vendor Selection
» Read more
The client, a global financial institution, had made the strategic decision to outsource all core processing of its Investment Business in the German retail banking arm.
Prior to formally committing to the vendor in terms of contractual and ongoing commercial aspects a stringent selection and due diligence process had to be completed.
One of the senior members of the Fenix team was engaged to lead the delivery of this key milestone with the respective client management.
The deliverable had a high degree of complexity and due to critical time pressure on dependent activities had to be implemented in a short timeframe.
Liaising with internal department heads, the external vendor and sub vendors Fenix produced a full end to end due diligence analysis document scoring against the client's global internal benchmarks on Financial, Operational and Technology subjects.
The end result was that a successful selection decision was made in line with both global corporate policies and the key project milestones.
Vendor Consolidation
» Read more
The client, a major US bank, was looking to implement an EMEA driven strategy on vendor consolidation. Our consultants were engaged to provide the management expertise to administer and quickly initiate delivery of the project commence the ROI (return on investment) in 2007.
Fenix consultants lead managed the transfer from indirect outsource provider to a direct outsourced provider. That year the project was the only one to come in on time and within budget in the EMEA region for the bank.
In line with the bank's global strategy, rationalisation of service providers is an ongoing challenge and often involves more than two parties. In this particular project the provider of print services was managed by the already outsourced settlement operations vendor. The bank therefore had the existing two parties as well as the incoming provider of print services as parties to the project. We were chosen to provide the team to project manage this change.
Due to other commitments within the bank for the Fenix team, a flexible approach was provided to manage the project. The flexible approach meant that management team provided by us would not exceed the budgeted cost of two people. A combination of three people would be used to ensure delivery was met on time and within budget.
The project office and project management were run by our consultants for the bank. Full project planning and administration was provided including local and regional management reporting.
During the initiation stage, it was decided that strategically it was best if the project were to be split into a number of phases. By doing this it would allow the cost saving to be realised early on in the project without compromising the service received by the bank's customers. It was also decided during the initiation stage that a number of the bank's wishes and future plans could be incorporated into later phases of the project.
Steps were also taken during the initiation stage to ensure that all development would be as generic as possible thereby allowing the platform to be used by other countries within the bank's global network. This would also include the use of multiple language versions of the application.
Once the business case was produced and agreed by all parties a thorough cost benefit analysis was undertaken and approved by local and regional management. The detailed analysis was used extensively during negotiations with the three external parties and helped achieve the accolade of being the only project to come in on budget within the region. The project would also pay for itself within 12 months of the first 3 phases being delivered. This is another significant achievement for a project within the EMEA region.
Planning and directing the project took place as soon as the budgetary approval was given. Workshops were held to discuss the business requirements, infrastructure architecture, build, testing, test environments, implementation, handover to production and fallback.
The business requirements were collated and compiled in the BRD (Business Requirements Document). The Functional Specification Document (FSD) was then produced along with the Technical Specifications.
The project was controlled and managed throughout by regular steering committees and weekly meetings. The number of different parties involved with the project meant that a tighter rein then usual found on a project like this had to be kept on boundaries.
Delivery was on time for the first phase of the project and the handover to production was made ahead of schedule. The second and third phases were both delivered ahead of the original planned dates along with the production handover.
