implementation.' Responsibilities between the different protagonists involved in the project were also determined at the beginning. Arrangements were made for the roles to be reviewed every week also.
The bank divided its project staff into a branch team, a functional team, a testing team and a technical team. The branch team would have the job of extracting data from legacy systems and mapping it to Bancs, and ensuring the branches' requirements were met. The functional team was charged with arranging the functional design of the business processes. The testing team was kept independent and was focused on testing the functionalities for gaps to ensure business acceptance as well as smooth working of the application: several rounds of user acceptance and stress testing were undertaken during the implementation. And the technical team was to concentrate on the hardware set- up, the system set-up and an understanding of the application. It was to work with the functional team to make sure requirements were catered for. For its part, TCS was responsible for overseeing the migration of data from the legacy systems into Bancs, stress testing the new system to make sure it could cope with the volumes specified in the contract, and designing and implementing Bancs, which was customised accordingly. TCS was also mandated to provide general support in testing and in the go-live process, as well as after the go-live. Meanwhile, the most significant third party involved was ADT, which was working on the payment system gateway and on interfacing with regulatory bodies.
Staff training was arranged into different phases during the implementation. Senior branch users were initially chosen to learn about the new system, with three weeks' training direct from TCS. They then had a further month to familiarise themselves, and in the two months before the go-live were given the task of training their colleagues. This continued after the go-live also. Unlike in many core banking implementations, Xuejun suggested that there was no resistance to the new system from the users. 'There was not much reluctance as staff were convinced they could provide better services, and offer flexible products with a lower turnaround time,' he explained.
Results
The system formally went live in October 2009, so about 20 months after it had started. This was in line with original estimates. About 200 branches were using
