Challenges faced during system changeover

1. I.T Project Challenges
Challenges encountered during a financial
system change over.

2. Introduction
• Being in a financial institute I was recently part
of the project team that was conducting
change management of the main financial
system.
• This provided several lessons which I thought I
should share.

3. Commitment from Department
heads
• There was some reluctance in commitment
from other department heads. They know the
project will affect them but because it is not
directly under them they tend to treat it very
casually and don’t prioritize things like their
action points or even attending status update
meetings.

4. Not Owning the project
• Being a multinational company the project
was decided on by the parent company and
just rolled out to us. The main stakeholders
had no idea of the situation on the ground in
our country and the challenges we would face.
This led to unrealistic expectations that would
later affect the quality of the project.

5. Staff Recruitment
• This is a huge challenge as the project team
was not recruited by The I.T department but
HR recruited people from other departments
and the criteria used was they wanted people
who knew the old system so they wanted at
least 2 years with the organization. Some
people were slow at learning and this caused
delays.

6. Budget Constraints
• Different countries had different budgets for
the project depending on their liquidity and
profits so while the same project was being
implemented for $3.5 million we only had a
budget of $850 thousand. This meant we had
a smaller project team and as such there was
so much more work.

7. Staffing Constraints
• Due to having a smaller budget than the other
countries we had a project team only a third
of what was required. This was a concern on
the quality of the project as well but we were
determined to work with the available
resources and do the best we could with the
same.

8. Time Constraints
• Time was not on our side, all the experts
consulted said the project should have taken
between 18 and 24 months from inception to
implementation but we were told to do it in 8
months. Being a financial institution the
stakeholders were eager to start profiting
from the system they were spending $850
thousand on and so they wanted it in 8
months.

9. Quality not Prioritized
• The main stakeholders didn’t seem to
prioritize quality as evidenced by the time,
budget and staffing constrains. They just
heard of a better system and decided lets
implement that system without really
consulting the I.T team on all the important
factors that came with changing a system.

10. Summary
• Managing change is never easy and in this
case it was worse because it was a financial
institute and downtime was not an option as
this would mean losses which management
didn’t want.
• Quality of a project should be prioritized and
all the necessary resources set aside for the
best results.