Interview With Richard Thomas, Project Manager for the Monthly Reporting Project at Friends Provident. Friends Provident is a leading UK financial services group and a member of the FTSE100 Index. With a history dating back to 1832, it has three core businesses including UK Life and Pensions, International Life and Pensions and Asset Management. So you are project managing the Monthly Reporting Project at Friends Provident. Tell us about how the project was conceptualised. Well, until now FP has used various spreadsheet-based solutions. Essentially, these processes worked but there is a strong desire for a more rigorous business processes aligned with the overall strategic vision for FP. Another driving factor for a more sophisticated system is soft man-management; we want to shift the focus of the work roles from lengthy data collection on spreadsheets to actually analysing and reporting the data to aid business decisions. The change will also allow those who submit the numbers to feel a greater sense of ownership and empowerment. We believe this solution will address that. Hyperion’s Financial Management (HFM) application was selected for this solution. What where the compelling reasons for its selection? Not only did HFM come out tops as a consolidation tool during the selection process, but we feel that its scalability is suited to our roll-out approach. What is your roll-out approach? It’s all about managing the process change within the business, which is easier in manageable chunks. First, we’ll roll-out HFM for the major Group subsidiaries, which will handle data collection, consolidation and reporting on 6 monthly basis. Our ultimate aim is to use this tool as part of the monthly reporting process. How did you cope with the demands of business-as-usual? We made a decision at the very beginning of the project to not attempt to continue the project during year end. We basically put it into hibernation for a number of weeks which allowed the team to complete the year end and then re-start the project. Trying to run both at the same time may have left us with both tasks being performed poorly. This way both the project and business-as-usual got the appropriate attention. How do you manage the challenges of the business process change? Fortunately, I have great implementation team members who know FP’s business processes backwards. Coupled with their understanding of FP’s vision and technical know-how, I’m confident that the users and financial stakeholders will welcome the architecture and benefits of the new business processes alike. “We have the right guys in the right place” What are your tips for managing stakeholder expectations? Involve all your stakeholders from the beginning. Invite them to contribute to the initiation and design of the project and keep them in the loop as the project progresses. We also involve our auditors in the steering group to ensure that our implementation process is aligned with standard controls. This endorsement ensures confidence amongst other stakeholders. What role does proximity to each other play? The fact that we work closely together as a project team has been highly beneficial - it has given us the ability to make quick decisions and allowed the steering group to focus on guiding the project rather than handling day-to-day project activities. Tell us about some of the challenges outside of the steering group There is always the challenge of establishing and maintaining the balance between the Project, IT Department and the Vendor. The project team’s imperative is to deliver the solution, IT need to ensure that the solution is aligned with corporate rules and strategy and the vendor needs to be clear what is expected of them. What are your top tips for managing an HFM implementation?
So what is the next significant milestone that we should look forward to hearing about? We’ll be ‘going-live’ with the HFM implementation in June so we look forward to successful testing and training in the next few months!
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