Steering all the transverse transformation programs of a large European bank

• Steering platform for the bank’s major initiatives, leading to overachievement of the strategic and operational objectives. 

Following the acquisition of several financial institutions, the group launched a strategic program to simplify its processed and identify synergies over a period of 4 years. the plans consisted of 2700 projects in parallel in 40 countries at the cost of €2 billion investment, with expected savings of  €2 billion per year.

The bank needed a system to continuously update many parallel plans, keeping them consistent and coordinated. The system was expected to communicate fluidly, from the top down and the bottom up, between the internal and external stakeholders. One of the major expectations of the system was the provision of trustworthy and consistent information to governance and decision-making meetings.

We helped the bank translate its plan into a normalized tree structure, with granularity in line with the hierarchical organisation. The plans were then uploaded onto proPilot, thereby providing all staff involved the information, relevant to their level, that they needed to track their projects, their programs and portfolio.

People in the organisation were asked to provide updates on a monthly basis of the progress status of their projects, programs or portfolio, with simple qualitative indicators: weather forecast (sunny, clouded, rainy), trend (upwards, stable, downwards) achievement percentage. Thanks to proPilot‘s simple interface these updates took only 2 minutes. On a quarterly basis, people were requested to give their project/program/portfolio achievement forecast, using a small number of indicators of resources and impact.

In parallel, we defined the reports and dashboards needed for the bank’s governance meetings at every level, from the project level to the executive committee. Those reports were supplied with the qualitative input provided by the project stakeholders, and with the quantitative input from data sources such as the bank’s accounting system, ERP, HR systems, etc…

The reports and dashboards gave the bank’s management visibility over the performance of every project, enabling them to stop projects that were performing badly and to reallocate resources to projects that were performing well. Decisions over plan adaptations were directly integrated into proPilot‘s plans, and the subsequent actions communicated to all the stakeholders involved.

Head of Program Management said: “Agile, reliable and recurring information on complex initiatives, as well as a clear governance structure with regular decision-making meetings, are necessary for performance and overachievement. We ended up investing €2 billion, for a yearly saving of €3,5 billion. dFakto has been decisive in helping us overachieve the objectives of our plans. It was a no-brainer for us to use their data-driven management platform to steer our subsequent strategic plans.”