BT Financial Group Streamlines Information Gathering and Saves A$540,000 Per Year.

"The new system takes all the manual processes out of chasing people for information and copying it from other systems. This gives people time to focus on work that adds more value to the company."

Andrew James, Corporate Systems Manager,

Application and Services, BT Financial Group

BT Financial Group manages the wealth management operations of Westpac Banking Corporation, one of Australia‟s Big Four banks. It provides investment, margin lending, superannuation and retirement income products and manages more than A$64 billion in funds. BT‟s information technology department lacked a cohesive process for gathering information about defects and quality metrics for the 100-odd software projects it managed every year. Working with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner livePoint, BT Financial Group implemented a pilot project using Microsoft® Office SharePoint® Server 2007 to automate this process and provide a central repository for this data. Independent business analyst and consultant BearingPoint found BT Financial Group could save almost A$540,000 per year through reduced manual work and achieve a variety of operational and strategic benefits.

Situation

BT Financial Group has been helping Australians create and manage wealth since 1969. Its core business is providing investment, margin lending, superannuation and retirement income products. BT Financial Group manages and administers more than A$64 billion in funds. It provides a diverse range of investment choices for customers in Australia and New Zealand, including funds managed by its own team and through alliances with global investment managers. BT Financial Group is the investment management arm of Westpac Banking Corporation, which has delivered banking and financial services to Australians since 1817.

Each year, BT Financial Group‟s Information Technology division would manage around 100 software development projects for business units across Westpac. These may include developing new applications, feature changes and upgrades. Once each project was deployed, the IT group would collect information from business units about bugs and defects in each application release to judge the quality of the software. However, the IT group lacked a cohesive process for gathering and collating this information. Project managers would collect and copy information manually from a variety of internal systems into a Microsoft® Office Excel spreadsheet, a process which was prone to errors. “We ended up with hundreds of spreadsheets and no central database of quality metrics,” says Andrew James, Corporate Systems Manager in BT Financial Group‟s Application and Services department. “We couldn‟t get people in other business units to help us collect these metrics because it was too much of a manual system.

“There was no way of ensuring the right people had verified the data was entered correctly. This caused issues with analyzing the data because the data was not always accurate.” It fell to two staff members to collect the data and act as „traffic cop‟ to ensure people filled in their spreadsheets. This time-consuming manual process was a significant drain on productivity.

Solution

BT Financial Group wanted a way to streamline this process, build a workflow to ensure all relevant people contributed to it and improve the accuracy of information. Working with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner, livePoint, BT Financial Group implemented a pilot project based on Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Office SharePoint Server 2007 helps organizations gain better control and insight over their content, streamline their business processes and access and share information. “We had already been using Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server 2003 internally in the IT department,” says James. “When we saw the departmental workflow and forms capabilities of Office SharePoint Server 2007, we knew it would help us.” Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes functionality that helps organizations streamline business processes with easy-to-use, XML-based electronic forms that integrate smoothly with existing systems. This secure platform makes it easy to quickly develop and deploy forms-based workflow processes that can be accessed through the Microsoft® Office InfoPath® client or a Web browser. It can also extend business processes to customers, partners and suppliers.

“The workflows in particular have been the most impressive part of the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 arsenal. We are looking forward to taking advantage of improved departmental workflows throughout the entire company.” Andrew James, Corporate Systems Manager, Application and Services, BT Financial Group

“livePoint gathered the requirements from the IT group and business users,” says James. “Then they did a design workshop with some of our senior analyst programmers so we could verify we were happy with the design and it would work with our infrastructure.” Based on these discussions, livePoint put together a pilot project to automate the process of tracking software defects and gathering quality metrics. The system extracts data automatically from BT Financial Group‟s internal systems, allowing project managers to review and modify the information and then send the form to the appropriate people within BT Financial Group or the broader Westpac organization for their contributions or approval. “The system checks forms for errors automatically and warns people if they have made any mistakes,” says Teesaan Koo, Account Executive at livePoint. “This prevents simple typing errors leading to more serious problems when the figures are compiled and analyzed.” Once a form is approved, it is uploaded to a central database of defects and quality metrics. These figures can be aggregated and analyzed by project and business unit managers.

The implementation took approximately four weeks.

Benefits

As part of the pilot project, Microsoft engaged independent business analyst and consultant BearingPoint to measure the benefits of Office SharePoint Server 2007 for BT Financial Group.

BearingPoint identified a number of financial savings based on increased productivity, as well as strategic and compliance benefits. Streamlined Processes Save Almost A$540,000 a Year BearingPoint found the new system could greatly reduce the amount of time project metrics collators and project managers spent gathering, copying and checking information and chasing contributors to submit their data. “The new system takes all the manual processes out of chasing people for information and copying it from other systems,” says James. “This gives people time to focus on work that adds more value to the company.” By automating the process of extracting information from other systems and populating this data into forms, BT Financial Group‟s 40 project managers could each save a little over three hours per week.

Over the course of a year, this would save the company just under 5,000 hours, which equates to a financial saving of nearly A$490,000. BearingPoint also found that the Office SharePoint Server 2007 solution would reduce the amount of time the company‟s project metrics collators spent searching for documents, phoning contributors, updating and consolidating multiple spreadsheets and maintaining older versions of spreadsheets for auditing purposes. Altogether, this would save another 420 hours per year or almost A$50,000.

Taking into account the minor additional tasks the new system would require, BearingPoint found Office SharePoint Server 2007 would save BT Financial Group nearly A$540,000 each year.

More Accurate Information for Decision Making Replacing a multitude of spreadsheets with a single repository of metrics will greatly improve the quality and accessibility of information across the company, BearingPoint found. Extracting data from systems automatically and simple error-checking procedures built into the forms will reduce data entry errors significantly and improve the quality of information. “The new system provides better information because we know all the correct people are signing off on the data,” says James. “Making the data accessible from a Web browser also means business unit managers at Westpac can view and fill in the forms, even if they don‟t have Office InfoPath as part of their standard set of applications. “Previously, we were unable to provide departmental workflows with this level of sophistication. We‟ve been coding them manually, which takes a long time and has much higher maintenance costs.”
The new system makes it faster and easier to access information and enables IT department staff to search through the entire database of defects, something that was not possible when this data was stored in hundreds of spreadsheets.
“All these benefits combined allow us to make better-informed decisions by giving us accurate and timely data about all our software projects,” James explains.
Strategic Benefits

By improving the quality of information it has about its software projects, BT Financial Group‟s IT department can deliver improved service and, ultimately, better-quality software to the business units that rely on it.

BearingPoint found this leading-edge use of technology would improve staff morale within the IT department and boost perceptions of the department across the company. The new system also puts BT Financial Group in a better position to comply with internal and financial industry governance requirements regarding the accuracy, auditability and traceability of information. Future Plans Having completed this pilot project, BT Financial Group is pursuing a number of other pilots before a planned BT Financial Group-wide rollout of Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 in January 2007. Planned projects include:

An intranet to add new internal communications channels including blogs and wikis.
A collaboration tool for the company‟s business units and partners.
A records and document management solution for the legal and risk division.

“The workflows in particular have been the most impressive part of the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 arsenal,” says James. “We are looking forward to taking advantage of improved departmental workflows throughout the entire company.”