Independent Review of Banking technology programs

Independent Program Reviews

Key Capabilities Demonstrated

Project review and assessment

Governance and leadership effectiveness assessment

Delivery Optimisation

Change implementation guidance

SofM helped a major bank improve the delivery of their digital transformation initiatives by conducting a series of independent program reviews and recommending improvements.

Situation

A major Australian bank engaged State of Matter to perform a series of project reviews to assess and make recommendations on its technology delivery portfolio.

The focus was on delivery capability, leadership effectiveness, governance, reporting, and ways of working. The reviews covered multiple projects and platforms, including:

Open Banking Platform
Core Banking System Transition
Customer Migration
Business Banking Document Sharing Migration
Collateral Management System Implementation
Product and Pricing System Update
Various other strategic projects

Challenge

The bank faced significant hurdles in implementing its digital transformation initiatives. These challenges threatened to derail the project’s timeline, budget, and overall success:

Lack of a holistic/end-to-end view of and control over the portfolio of projects.
Limited coordination between major technology vendors and internal teams.
Siloed way of working that could not support the complex nature of the Open Banking Platform implementation.
Delayed delivery dates due to ineffective ways of working.

What we did

We conducted thorough reviews of all projects to produce relevant and fact-based recommendations. The key activities that took place across all reviews were:

Review of key program documentation vs. best practice program management standards.
Seeking feedback from relevant stakeholders to capture what worked well, what didn’t work well, and lessons learned.
Conducting Executive interviews to assess program objectives and phasing, governance and decision making, roles and responsibilities, business engagement and cost.
Production of a final report to synthesise the findings and recommendations.

Outcome

Our comprehensive approach and clear recommendations achieved strong uptake and led to improvements across the bank’s digital transformation initiatives, delivering both immediate results and long-term benefits.

The key outcomes of the project reviews included:

Improved governance and control over the delivery cadence of releases.
Enhanced transparency and accountability across projects.
Established a more effective and collaborative way of working across teams and vendors.
Improved executive confidence in program delivery.