Key takeaways
- Financial institutions often struggle to complete strategic projects in business-critical areas like technology modernization or customer experience.
- Outsourced project management provides the structure, governance and dedicated capacity needed to move strategic initiatives forward while allowing internal leaders and subject matter experts to remain focused on running the institution.
- Look for a project manager who understands both disciplined project management and the financial services environment, including the operational, security, regulatory, compliance and third-party considerations that can affect project execution.
Financial institutions struggling to complete critical strategic projects often benefit from outsourced project management. An outsourced or fractional project manager can help your internal team maintain momentum on critical projects necessary for your institution’s future, keeping work on track and on time.
Keep reading to learn more.
Why do many financial institutions have trouble completing strategic projects?
More financial institutions are considering outsourced project management support because their strategic projects often fall behind schedule or lose focus. This typically occurs from a combination of overwork, limited visibility, lack of accountability and unclear governance and decision-making.
- Capacity constraints: Internal teams tasked with completing a strategic project (like implementing a new CRM) must typically do so while also juggling their ordinary day-to-day responsibilities, which makes it tough to build and sustain momentum.
- Limited visibility and silos: A big strategic project will almost always involve multiple teams or departments within your institution, like operations, compliance, risk, security and IT. But there’s frequently little coordination between these different functions and no one to help them communicate with each other.
- Lack of accountability: Too often, no one individual owns a big project, or the person assigned a lead role may lack training and upskilling in project governance. This means there’s no central person, team or methodology to push the project team to maintain deadlines, deliver on performance milestones and give the project the resources it needs to succeed.
- Unclear governance and decision-making: Projects stall when team members are unclear on decision rights, sponsors and escalation paths.
How does a slow or stalled strategic project harm your financial institution?
A slow or stalled strategic project may seem more like a frustration than a mission-critical problem. But consider that the financial services industry is currently in the middle of an era of change and uncertainty, with fintech and nontraditional banking options increasingly staking a claim on territory long held by traditional financial institutions.
Today, your institution needs to adapt in order to survive. This often involves balancing technology modernization, changing customer and member expectations, regulatory requirements, process improvement and ongoing operational demands. When strategic initiatives stall, institutions delay the benefits those investments were intended to deliver and even risk losing customers and market share.
Financial institutions need a way to advance strategic initiatives without sacrificing the day-to-day operations, controls and customer or member responsibilities that keep the institution running.
How does outsourced project management help financial institutions achieve strategic goals?
Outsourced project management helps financial institutions complete critical projects in support of strategic goals by helping ensure that projects are finished on time and within scope. A project manager provides dedicated project leadership and coordination, establishes the project structure, maintains the plan, monitors project health and helps make sure risks, issues and decisions reach the right people at the right time.
Creating clear project leadership and governance
A fractional project manager provides a dedicated point of coordination for the initiative. They clarify roles and responsibilities, establish the project structure and help maintain alignment between the project and its business objectives.
Coordinating between departments
The project manager is able to coordinate between all departments and functions involved, reducing the risk that the project gets sidetracked by silos. The project manager coordinates across operations, technology, compliance, risk, security, vendors and other stakeholders while identifying dependencies between their activities.
Establishing governance
Strategic projects require clear governance. The project manager helps establish who makes decisions, who provides input, how issues are escalated and how key decisions are documented.
Delivering accountability
A project manager establishes visibility into assignments, milestones and deadlines, follows up with owners and escalates when commitments or project objectives are at risk.
Managing resources and dependencies
To avoid team members involved in the project getting overworked or burned out (especially while also managing day-to-day duties), an outsourced project manager can keep a close eye on capacity.
Supporting project health and leadership visibility
A project manager can give regular updates to leadership on the project’s status. This keeps leaders informed on progress and able to more accurately assess whether the project is on track and properly resourced.
Offering an objective focus
An outsourced project manager is not a part of your regular team, so they offer an objective focus on how your institution operates and fresh eyes that can help spot operational issues or gaps that your team might miss. This makes it easier for leadership to intervene while options are still available rather than after a milestone has already been missed.
Navigating risks
Financial institutions must incorporate risk management into their project work. A project manager can identify and help manage risks like compliance and regulatory issues, third-party vendors, workforce challenges and unexpected delays.
What does an effective outsourced project management process look like?
Here’s what an effective process for creating and executing on a strategic project could look like:
1. Define the business objective and success criteria
Any major project should solve a specific business problem or otherwise serve one of your core strategic goals. Get really clear on what problem you want to solve before doing anything else. Define the clear end-state you want the project to achieve. This should be measurable and specific.
2. Establish governance and project roles
Identify the key team members you’ll need to solve your business problem. These people will serve as your project team.
3. Bring in an outsourced project manager
If you haven’t yet, bring in an outsourced project manager to own the project and coordinate between all the team members involved. The most effective project manager will be one who knows the financial services industry and understands the unique needs of financial institutions.
4. Build a project management plan
The outsourced project manager and project team should develop a plan to implement the project and achieve its stated goal. This should include establishing milestones and dependencies, identifying risks, creating a timeline and setting clear expectations around who is accountable for each aspect of the project.
5. Identify risks
Identify key risks, assumptions, issues and dependencies affecting your project. Assign owners and define mitigation actions before and during execution.
6. Maintain accountability
Once you start executing the project plan, the outsourced project manager should actively keep your team accountable for meeting deadlines, achieving milestones and delivering other results.
Your team knows your institution. Your vendors know their solutions. An independent project manager helps connect those groups while keeping execution focused on your institution’s objectives.
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We help financial institutions achieve their strategic goals, including by providing project management training, tool enablement and outsourced services. Let’s talk about where you want your institution to go and how you can get there. Start a conversation.