Providian Trust
Case 1 (Providian Trust) / Analysis write-up/discussion questions.
(1) What key issues and challenges led to the initiation of the Access Plus project? Please think about the external vs. internal and business vs. technological aspects of the issues and challenges.
From an internal point of view, Providian Trust board members felt that the trust’s information system was outdated and therefore the day-to-day activities, which could be done more efficiently with a new software and process, were taking long periods of time and lots of resources. Per example, generating a financial report for a client would take the effort of several trust operators from the front office and back office which is an excess of human resource, and would take about 3 months to generate it. Clients felt they didn’t have to wait so much for a report. These kind of complain were making Providian Trust look bad against their competitors, who took considerably less time doing the same activities. Technological speaking, the Access Plus project has a big challenge. According to the information provided, the trust officers are very old dated when it comes to PC usage, some of them don’t even use one. One of the biggest division of Providian Trust (Pension & Institutional Trust Services) had the largest amount of full time employees (FTE) yet they were losing money, that’s why another important issue that led to the initiation of this project was the amount of money that was wasted by wrong handling of processes. Since trust officers usually gave late or inaccurate statements, the company was giving around 2 to 5 million $ a year in compensating wages.
(2) What organizational changes that the company should have made (but failed to do) before and during the project to ensure the success of the Access Plus project?
This project was basically a change initiative project. To have an effective change implementation, a careful evaluation of the problem needs to be made to begin with. I
(1) What key issues and challenges led to the initiation of the Access Plus project? Please think about the external vs. internal and business vs. technological aspects of the issues and challenges.
From an internal point of view, Providian Trust board members felt that the trust’s information system was outdated and therefore the day-to-day activities, which could be done more efficiently with a new software and process, were taking long periods of time and lots of resources. Per example, generating a financial report for a client would take the effort of several trust operators from the front office and back office which is an excess of human resource, and would take about 3 months to generate it. Clients felt they didn’t have to wait so much for a report. These kind of complain were making Providian Trust look bad against their competitors, who took considerably less time doing the same activities. Technological speaking, the Access Plus project has a big challenge. According to the information provided, the trust officers are very old dated when it comes to PC usage, some of them don’t even use one. One of the biggest division of Providian Trust (Pension & Institutional Trust Services) had the largest amount of full time employees (FTE) yet they were losing money, that’s why another important issue that led to the initiation of this project was the amount of money that was wasted by wrong handling of processes. Since trust officers usually gave late or inaccurate statements, the company was giving around 2 to 5 million $ a year in compensating wages.
(2) What organizational changes that the company should have made (but failed to do) before and during the project to ensure the success of the Access Plus project?
This project was basically a change initiative project. To have an effective change implementation, a careful evaluation of the problem needs to be made to begin with. I