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Project Delivery

CIV has a proven track record of successful project delivery throughout business and technology organizations, from deep-dive data analytics to project management of workflow application development.  We believe that the key driver of success in any project, regardless of type, is a keen awareness, and rigorous tracking of:

  • Project Goals
  • Resources
  • Cost and Budget
  • Time and Schedule
  • Issues and Risks

The above factors are the key components of the CIV Project Framework, within which CIV offers the following services:

  • Facilitated Workshops
  • Project Management
  • Business Requirements
  • Application Development
  • Compliance and Control Services

CIV understands that a pragmatic, results driven approach, combining a client’s individual strengths and methodologies with CIV’s depth of expertise is the key to successful projects of any kind.

Case Studies

Project Management Framework

A major retail brokerage firm upgraded their systems in 463 branch offices throughout the US and had a high level plan to design systems for the branch offices. The complexity of the project lay in the configuration and logistics involved in each branch office, and this aspect was overlooked in the planning phase.

When the technology department presented the high level plan to senior management and demo’d the applications, the assumption was that it was now simply a matter of deployment. With this assumption, senior managers began to focus on other areas of the business and the technology group began the implementation.

Thirteen months later the project was hugely behind schedule and the truth came out that the logistics to deploy such a huge amount of technology were underestimated. The fix for the project was unfortunately to replace the project team and start from scratch.

CIV inserted a new team, one-third of the size, immediately focused on the deployment and configuration problem and created a realistic schedule of upgrades. CIV implemented our reporting and tracking framework to keep senior management informed and included in the project until completion. The project was successfully implemented by a smaller team through realistic goals, senior management support, and ongoing communication.

Critical Systems Performance Monitoring

An international equity trading operation asked CIV to help fix their equity technology support team because they were not confident that the team could resolve problems quickly enough and were not proactive in predicting problems before they occurred.

CIV worked with the team to determine how they approached support and discovered that they were looking at large amounts of data all the time. The overwhelming volume of data created a ‘monitoring fatigue’ for the support folks because they could not determine what was important and what was noise.

Once CIV interviewed the system users to determine what was most critical, it designed a simple monitoring system that focused on those critical systems and reported the health and status of all components 24 hours per day. CIV eventually created a monitoring dashboard that was published to every trader screen, which simply showed the health (green/amber/red) of each critical system.

The visual dashboard, although simple, restored confidence in the support team and gave them the ability to focus on improving further their overall support structure. The daily report sent to each member of the trading team showed the number of problems avoided through preventative measures further increasing confidence. By truly understanding what was critical for the business to operate the team became ‘effective’ and these simple steps restored a critical relationship between the business and technology.