Overcoming project blockers in financial institutions How to find them? How to eliminate them?

I am Avetis Ovakimyan, Your Presenter! “HELLO” I am Avetis Ovakimyan, Your Presenter! I’ve been working in banking sector for last 6 years. Over the course of my career I worked as a risk manager, dealer, fund raiser, project manager and now I’m working as the portfolio manager in one of the credit organizations (considered as FinTech) specialized in business intelligence and data analysis.

Presentation Structure PM in finance. To be, or not to be? Process breakdown Questions? Financial sector organizations can’t be imagined nothing other than functional ones and PMs are working within those narrow limits Where are the blockers and wastes in initiation, planning, execution and other stages? Comments, thoughts or questions ? 1 3 5 2 4 Initiatives and projects What could be used? New products, branches, websites, digitalization, optimization… all these initiatives could have been done faster, cheaper and better with proper management approach Tools and techniques that might be useful in YOUR company

PM in finance. To be, or not to be? Currently, financial sector is overcompetitive and recent changes in minimum capital requirement forced everyone to decrease the rates and offer all type of products to maximize customer lifetime value. Now the quality of service and the speed are the main drivers of the development, which are highly dependant on IT solutions. Main challenges of project manager in finance. Building up a sound team Being Agile in functional organization Eliminate time wastes of non-value added activities Try hard to avoid scope creep

Projects and Initiatives Some projects that are currently popular in banking sector. Digital/Online Banking 01 02 Underwriting automation Customers are not willing to stand in the queue for a money transfer, new loan or a repayment of the old one. Now it’s digital century and banks tend to have their own applications Too much time is spent on underwriting procedure of consumer loans which consists of only manual checking of some rules. That’s need to be done in blink of an eye Business intelligence Workflow optimization 03 04 Building up a sound business intelligence system is a tough nut to crack that needs programming resources and in-depth knowledge of financial system We always come up to a situation where we understand that current system is obsolete and new tools needs to be developed. Joint projects with non-banking sector 05 The situation when project manager has its least power and authority . Controlling the process becomes comparably difficult.

Process Breakdown Planning, planning and again planning. Schedules, budget, risk, everything needs to be considered Nothing different from regular controlling Initiation Execution Lessons learned Planning Control Start Finish Thorough analysis needs to be done before the PID is presented to Management Gather the team and start working and don’t forget about reporting What worked and didn’t work well? What we need to improve for the next project?

Process Breakdown, initiation & Planning Initiation phase is very much tied to planning and sometimes management needs to see information that is more peculiar to planning phase. Things to consider: Stakeholder and risk analysis as deep as possible Proper and detailed schedules and resource need identification Getting official sign-off

Process Breakdown, Execution & Controlling Things that hinders the project: Non-Value added actions that are just waste of time Procurement and vendor issues No integrity in the team due to lack of information No commitment from the team because of being functional… Team can be transferred to “urgent” task by the same management that expects results from you

Process Breakdown, wastes Process wastes Defects, over-processing, waiting… Information wastes Missing data, wrong data People wastes Underutilized talents, unclear roles, lack of training, MULTITASKING

Tools and Techniques Value Stream mapping 2 Whiteboard meetings 1 3 Every project depends on the strong team, technical support and tools for proper management. Here we’ll go through in Value Stream mapping 2 Bird eye view of the situation and easy to show what are we doing. Whiteboard meetings 1 3 Another type of visualization is whiteboard meetings 5-15 min stand up meetings to discuss main KPIs of the project Visual Management 4 Simple things to make problems visible.. Process maps and flow charts as example, These method let’s you find the most vulnerable processes that might need support Work standardization Let’s hope that some day our process will be standardized by our experience and lessons learned that all the projects will be finished in minimum time and within the budget.

Tools and Techniques, example Cross-functional flow chart

Tools and Techniques, example Whiteboard meetings sample

THANKS FOR your time, Questions ? Contact details: www.linkedin.com/in/avetisovakimyan +374 94 06 77 70 Avetis.Ovakimyan@gmail.com