Client had got to the end of their first year trading but hadn’t made as much profit as they thought they would. Finstech was brought in to review the figures and suggest initiatives for improved profitability.
Our consultant started by reviewing the income, creating a summary of each week’s income, the available days, staff absence and snagging jobs (where a site has to be revisited to touch up). Next, they created a schedule which presented the value of all jobs, be month, by the number of estimated days. Our consultant then turned his attention to the costs, reviewing the figures in the client’s accounting software and correctly allocating the costs into the right accounts. Each account was then reconciled, before combining the cost analysis against the income. This data was presented back to the Operations Director together with a number of initiatives to improve profitability.
Objective – Brought in to project manage enhancements of a Pension Administration system
Rob was initially brought in to project manage part of a large programme of work to enhance an existing Pensions Administration system. Shortly after starting the engagement, it became clear that the programme was at a critical point in terms of delivery timescales committed and what could be realistically achieved. To address this, Rob created an options paper which was presented to Project Sponsors with a number of approaches, impacts & costings to get the project back on track. Part of the change in approach agreed with key stakeholders was to address the planned update of the pensions administration system, by the supplier of the platform. After an impact assessment on a scheduled update by the supplier of the pensions administration system was completed, instigated by Rob, some additional development work was identified. This work was critical to ensure the platform could continue to be operational following the planned update so had a fixed deliverable. Rob took control of the workstream, identifying & securing the resource required, creating a plan and running the project in an Agile way due to the fixed nature of the deadline. A whiteboard kanban board and daily stand-ups were introduced, as well as the creation of a detailed implementation plan which had tasks that needed to be performed in a specific order by resources at different sites across the UK. The weekend implementation was successful and disaster averted!
Objective –Migration of an on-premise application datastore to the Azure Cloud, and provision of associated SSRS reports
Operating on a Statement of Work (SoW) basis with specific deliverables, our Consultants worked remotely using client hardware to deliver this critical client project. Whilst there was an understanding of the Cloud technology within the organisation, there was a knowledge gap regarding the proposed architecture. Finstech were engaged to outline the solution architecture, as well as working alongside the existing project team to support the development of the solution. In addition to the migration, one of our consultants was also required to work with the business to provide updates to a complex suite of SSRS reports, as well as develop the existing tabular model for additional data attributes and bring these through to the PowerBi reports. As a result of our work, an additional SoW has been signed to architect and deliver the migration process for another (larger) on-premise database that supports a critical cloud application.
