Project Risk Mitigation Case Study

A multi-strategy asset management firm with $80B+ AUM, a strong global presence and a diverse mix of product offerings that include fixed income, equities and alternative investments.  They outsourced their Middle Office operations.

Challenges:

The demands of migrating to an outsourced provider model was exacerbated by our Client’s separation from its parent company to form an independent firm.  Eventual loss of support services and legacy knowledge from the parent company was a critical risk.  In addition, the complex and highly critical migration process had to be tracked and managed.  As part of the Performance Group’s quality assurance efforts to control and validate data, data from the newly migrated outsourced system had to be reconciled and vetted. Prior to and in parallel with the migration process, performance re-engineering initiatives were being executed to streamline operations, enhance efficiencies, and reduce operational risks.  These initiatives required tracking and management as well, to ensure successful integration with the new outsourced provider model.

IKINDI Solution:

Prior to our Client’s separation and migration, IKINDI carried out analysis and planning efforts to address operational and regional readiness, define scope of shared support services during transition period, and determine how applications were to be segregated. Additionally, efforts were made to collect, analyze and rationalize relevant benchmarks.

IKINDI tracked and managed both the migration and performance re-engineering initiatives, in coordination with various internal groups such as PMO, Performance, Operations, Marketing, and Technology.

Key performance re-engineering components tracked include:

• Definition of the daily and month-end production cycles
• Validation and oversight requirements
• Post-Client User Acceptance Testing (CUAT) regional readiness
• Consolidation of attribution systems
• Report rationalization
• Benchmark rationalization and centralization
• Account master build-out
• Definition of performance organization and structure.

Key migration components tracked include:

• Analysis of outsourced provider SLA and operating model
• Definition of security classification schemes
• Final verification of benchmarks
• Account model and historical returns
• Client user acceptance testing
• Cut-over requirements
• Delivery of interfaces.

IKINDI also contributed significantly to the re-engineering of Performance Operations through rationalisation of reports (1,000 reports eliminated) and the introduction of IKINDI developed controls, procedures and tools to ensure data integrity of the Account Master and a timely update process.  With the use of KTier™, IKINDI created a central repository to house the Account Master which was previously stored in a departmental database with limited scalability.

Results:

Pre-separation legacy knowledge along with vital pre-separation benchmark information was successfully transitioned, resulting in a continuity of knowledge base in the Client’s newly formed organization.

Transparency regarding the migration process as well as the performance re-engineering process was greatly enhanced through the firm-wide availability of IKINDI’s project management reports.  IKINDI improved visibility of the project’s progress, accomplishments, critical risks and issues, key hurdles, interdependencies, as well as important decisions required to mitigate risks and resolve issues.  IKINDI bridged gaps between internal constituencies and the external outsource provider, acting in various roles as communicator, moderator and facilitator.

IKINDI’s report rationalization efforts – part of the performance re-engineering initiatives – resulted in a standardized package of reports with consistent formats,  global accessibility and an improved professional look, while drastically reducing the excessive volume of reports previously available.

IKINDI’s creation of a single repository to house the Account Master, along with the supporting controls and procedures, provided a highly reliable and centralized mechanism to view and update critical attributes, with proper checks and balances and with data integrity assured.

In executing efforts to consolidate our Client’s multiple attribution systems, IKINDI successfully assisted in negotiating with the vendor of choice, achieving significant savings in procurement costs for our client.