Resource Planning and Management of Information Technology Operations in a Bank

Abstract

In 2004, ABC Bank has introduced a 3-year business plan and initiated a series of reforms in major business models. In order to align the bank’s business and IT strategies, the IT department of the bank combined organizational restructuring, process and technological expertise to shape the 5-year IT development strategy in 2005. One of the major workflow and organization restructuring in IT department is the application development division (responsible for system design and program coding) and the system planning division (responsible for user acceptance test co-ordination and quality control) being changed from departmental-oriented to functional-oriented. Each functional team will have its own project schedules and commitments to business users. And, all functional teams will request for involvement of the production management division (PMD) that is responsible for system management, production support and operations. During the execution of the strategic plan, various projects are newly initiated or reviewed. In the meantime, problems such as high work pressures, delay in project schedule and occurrence of repeated incidents arose in the IT department.

The objective of this project is to identify the current inefficiencies on IT resources planning and management in the bank and make recommendations on technological and methodological changes. In order to understand the root causes, casual chats and interviews were conducted with staff from PMD and different functional team. Besides, for further verification, quantitative analysis is conducted in some areas such as number of deployment requests and floor space utilization in data center. After analysis, the observations and findings shown that biased workload, unrealistic project schedule estimation, too many repeated manual works, heterogeneous hardware resources etc, are the root causes of the stated problems.

After search of relevant literatures and finding implementation references in the banking industry, I realized that the ITIL framework is applicable to the case. And matching the stages and processes of ITIL to the problems discovered in ABC Bank, the problems can be categorized into four processes in the ITIL framework, that is, the release and deployment management process under the service transition stage, the problem management and facilities management processes under the service operation stage and availability management process under the service design stage. After categorizing the problems, I try to identify possible solutions that can tackle the stated problems. And, a SWOT analysis is carried out to evaluate the options for the 4-processes ITIL framework implementation in the bank. Alternatives and implementation priorities that given the greatest benefits are identified and the implementation schedule for the recommended solutions is divided into three phases. Some KPIs such as proportion of automatic deployment and repeated incidents are defined in order to measure the progress and performance of the solutions towards the project goal. Up to now, the implementation has reached the halfway mark, the progress and the achievement of each solution is evaluated. The implementations are in the right track and obvious benefits such as the shortened duration of major deployments and streamlined process because of procedures and standards review are achieved. Lastly, the challenges that I faced in the project, the success factors of the project and the lessons learned are documented in order to act as reference for future projects.