BUSINESS PROBLEM
A pension and savings plan firm for a large public sector institution needed to modernize its operations and the technology that sustained a huge fund and participant base.
They had been overcome with daunting strategic challenges because they’d grown accustomed to employing task teams composed of temporary resources to manage backlogs.
These backlogs resulted from highly manual and error-prone processes that crippled the firm’s operations.
Additionally, extensive inefficiencies presented substantial risk with over $80 Million in liabilities for the PII data being compromised.
It was critical that they replaced their out-of-support releases with the newest version of the core Omni System and its associated bundled products.
Mitigating the substantial risk of system failure and security vulnerabilities without vendor support (FIS) drove this need to maintain supported release status.
Their strategic goal to continuously maintain the latest versions of their Retirement Services software portfolio was critical to align their operations.
By not employing up-to-date software releases, the firm lacked the advantages of product bundling, which ensured greater compatibility plus integrated a servicing platform for their customers.
OUR SOLUTION
Planning for the implementation included a gap analysis of environments that needed to be built to support the development and parallel regression testing with the following:
Impact Analysis – Applications in the portfolio were analyzed based on their dependencies on the Omni platform
Test Environments – Parallel regression testing validated the function of major Retirements Services business processes including year-end deliverables and SOPs across large filesets
Omni Script Assessment – Potential impacts were determined on many Omni Script customizations and in integrated applications calling Omni Scripts from the Omni API
Performance Testing – Planned for core products and applications that integrate through the Omni API and Omni Scripts
Program Management:
- A multi-threaded program was executed to stream change requests through the SDLC process into production
- This accounted for dependencies between the objectives
- Metrics were defined for tracking and measuring progress towards program objectives
Unit Testing & Coordinated Unit Testing – Conducted Test Readiness Reviews (TRRS) to verify that everything was ready
Vulnerability Management/Security:
- Designed and implemented vulnerability testing of all the new products and integrated applications portfolio
- Security controls were implemented in the infrastructure, commercial, and custom software products
Deployment Readiness Review (DRR) – Finalized all documentation, determined implementation readiness, and assessed the project teams’ readiness to deploy
Operational Readiness Review (ORR) – Conducted by the customer to green light promotion of the changes for deployment
Post Implementation Monitoring – Conducted for 45 days to monitor core systems and adjudicate any persisting issues
RESULTS & CLIENT BENEFITS
Our Clients’ teams were enhanced with our veteran Retirement Services and Omni product suite SMEs.
This allowed their focus to remain on addressing parallel day-to-day operations guaranteeing a seamless transition of technology without impact on the client or their plan participants.
Core Omni calculations performed well with no participant data issues post-implementation and SOPs.
Client Channel processing and Quarterly statements were processed without incident.
Complex issues regarding the migration of filesets were root-cause analyzed and appropriate mitigations were designed.
They were then implemented to remedy those issues through system customization and training.
Where required, we orchestrated issue assessment and resolution through the vendor to address issues whose remedy could only be achieved in vendor-product quick fixes.