Vol. 2 #7
Hasty approvals often bypass critical scrutiny, leading to potential project failures.
With everything happening in banking today, the pressure’s always to get things done-quickly. Deadlines loom; there’s a sense of urgency to move forward. In haste, however, rushing through approvals can be very expensive, especially when involving core banking transformations. Rushing through approval processes only serves to avoid the tough questions or to meet some arbitrary deadline at the expense of oversights and mistakes which otherwise might have been guarded against by more careful scrutiny.
Anecdote: One of the core banking transformation programs in a leading financial institution was expedited because of the looming regulatory deadline. The approval process was hastened—the review and testing time was very minimal. Some senior stakeholders expressed reservations, which were overlooked in the interest of expediency. Within weeks of the new system going live, critical issues arose that should have been picked up during the hurried approval process. This brought an expensive remediation effort with it and resulted in the suspension of system operations. The experience underlined once more how costly it could be to hurry through approvals without sufficient due diligence.
Antidote: Thorough Review Processes
Establish a multi-stage structured approval process. The process is to include stakeholders from different departments who can review it comprehensively on all aspects of the project.
Also, it is a good practice to spend time dealing with hard questions. These should not be seen as obstacles, but steps to toughen the plan. By dealing with all the questions and coming up with satisfactory answers before proceeding, it exposes issues long before they become cause for alarm.
What most of the time allows one project in core banking to fly high and another to bomb is simply taking one’s time to get things right rather than racing to an artificial deadline. That means no making of expensive mistakes and laying a sound base for long-term.
Found this article interesting? Check out these three related reads for more.
- Corporate candor: Overcoming silence in meetings to address underlying disagreements (A new series)
- Corporate Candor: Risk management in core banking projects (A New Series)
- Corporate Candor: The importance of diverse perspectives (A New Series)
#CoreBankingTransformation #QuickApprovals
