Technology consulting for a trading firm

Solution

Throughout the project, Itransition conducted nearly 50 offline and online meetings with the customer’s key stakeholders and departmental representatives to understand the organizational needs and objectives. We captured and documented process insights and created a departmental structure diagram and a comprehensive infrastructure map with all software tools in use. Based on this evaluation, we developed recommendations for each department to address identified pain points and leverage improvement opportunities. The provided document also included a proposed roadmap to guide the effective implementation of these recommendations.

Strategy & roadmap

Itransition suggested a phased approach for implementing this consulting initiative, with key phases involving the onsite work of our consulting specialists. By breaking down the project into manageable phases, we could focus on achieving specific goals and objectives with greater accuracy and adjust our strategies based on real-time feedback and results. Our consultants conducted onsite consultations and interviews to immerse themselves in the work environment and understand the organizational culture. By combining onsite interactions with online interviews with the customer’s teams, we gathered comprehensive insights necessary to conceptualize the required changes.

At the beginning of our consulting engagement, we followed a structured approach that included the following stages:

Analysis

During the analysis phase, we delved into the details of the client's business context and IT operations landscape. This phase involved a series of targeted interviews with key stakeholders, including C-level executives and department heads, conducted by our business analysts to understand their expectations. This session was designed to gather comprehensive insights into the organizational context, including an overview of customers, vendors, products, and services. We also explored the organizational structure and background, which helped us better understand the company’s strategic objectives. Moreover, a substantial part of these meetings was devoted to discussing key business processes, which were fundamental to the organization's operations.

Then, our IT team identified and studied the systems currently in use across various departments and determined the connections between these systems. The outcome of these discussions was a comprehensive map that illustrated the client’s current system infrastructure landscape, encompassing around 80 external and internal systems, and described the key data flows between these systems, providing a clear picture of the technological backbone of the organization.

The analysis phase continued with a series of meetings with department heads, who were the business process owners. These discussions were aimed at uncovering the key business processes and artifacts within each department to create a high-level business process map. We typically documented these processes using SIPOC diagrams, which outlined the Supplier, Input, Process, Output, and Customer for each process. This approach allowed us to construct a high-level map of how the processes interconnected and supported one another across the organization.

The next stage of the analysis phase involved a thorough examination of the customer’s specific business processes. It included a series of detailed interviews and discussions with key personnel, such as department heads and team leaders. We conducted interviews with subject matter experts and business process owners to gather details about the processes they oversee. The objective was to capture process logic, details, and specific systems or roles responsible for executing each process step. These insights were crucial for understanding the nuances of how the business operates on a day-to-day basis. Each interview was also an opportunity to delve into the challenges faced by the staff. We asked interviewees to share their pain points and ideas for improvements, as well as highlight useful features that positively impacted their work. Throughout the meetings and interviews, we identified gaps in processes and systems, which we then graded based on their value and relevance to the business needs.

Recommendations

After thoroughly examining the organizational context and specific business processes and gathering feedback at multiple levels, we identified and summarized the main pain points across the organization. We then developed comprehensive documentation with recommendations and potential benefits for each department of the customer’s company.

Pain point	Recommendation	Benefits
Numerous manual processes and high document handling workload with frequent use of paper files and Excel	Automate key processes and routine tasks through automated workflows and rules and use OCR for document management	Improved operational efficiency, reduced employee and administration effort, time savings, alleviated employee and customer frustration, and enhanced data accuracy
Lack of standardization across regions with operations and communication split across multiple disparate platforms leading to inefficiencies, inconsistencies, and data discrepancies	Consolidate the overlapping systems across the company, fully utilize the existing tools by leveraging more out-of-the-box features and automation and making the most of Salesforce, retire excessive tools	Enhanced efficiency and data consistency, improved cross-departmental collaboration, reduced reliance on external systems and lowered vendor fees, reduced errors and lost information, and seamless user experience across all departments
Lack of or insufficient KPI insights with reporting and KPI tracking carried out through manual data consolidation from various sources (e.g. Google Sheets), which negatively impacted performance and customer satisfaction and hindered effective decision-making	Automate reporting and introduce real-time KPI dashboards in Power BI	Insight into business health and trade metrics, enhanced performance tracking, lowered reliance on manual data consolidation, better data security, enhanced report accuracy. This will eventually promote data-driven decision-making, clear goal-setting and alignment, and strategic planning and accountability
Training gaps, with Salesforce capabilities underutilized across all offices	Provide Salesforce training and develop education materials on Salesforce functionality for staff. Establish a structured communications and training framework to ensure all teams use the new tech efficiently	Improved system utilization, streamlined onboarding for new team members, strengthened cross-team collaboration, higher productivity and engagement, and reduced reliance on manual workarounds
Insufficient role clarity leading to the misalignment of responsibilities	Develop departmental roles and responsibilities-related documentation	Clarified accountability and improved internal communication
Early-stage Agile practices reducing efficiency	Adopt the Agile methodology	Increased efficiency, improved adaptability to changes, strengthened team collaboration and communication, and faster project delivery due to iterative progress and continuous feedback loops
Manual deployment being time-consuming and error-prone, often delayed by network and resource issues	Automate deployment	Shortened project timelines, improved deployment accuracy, repeatability and system stability, and strengthened scalability to support future growth and faster iterations

Each recommendation included a weighted expert-assigned score, factoring in business value, confidence level, and estimated implementation and training costs.

Having elaborated on the initial recommendations and prioritized them depending on their urgency, Itransition's experts developed detailed requirements and solution designs for the selected priorities. Our consultants and architects were available to support this process, offering expertise in defining implementation strategies and solution options. The provided documentation paved the path for executing the implementation phase based on the finalized designs and solutions.

Itransition also designed a comprehensive training roadmap that included face-to-face sessions and online courses to meet diverse learning preferences and organizational needs. This plan also entailed creating a set of educational materials along with a wiki knowledge base for continuous reference to help staff swiftly adapt to new changes.