IBS Journal February 2015


‘There was lots of tension, with everyone trying to prove


that their point of view was the right one.’ Abdel Karem Freihat, Jordan Kuwait Bank


the project as a whole. Freihat explains: ‘if people have used a system for more than 20 years, it’s not easy for them to embrace a different way of business. We found that most of the gaps that were highlighted – although not all of them – were related to the user trying to bring the new system back to the state of the old system.’ There were some legitimate require-


ments, however. ICS Banks did not have treasury functionality embedded within the system, so the bank insisted on this be- ing added. Nevertheless, ‘sometimes I think we over-stressed the importance of doing certain things in a certain way, because the best practice is to minimise customisation and development work’, Freihat reflects. This goal was kept in sight by the bank with the use of a change management track, which was part of the management team structure. This track had the goal of promoting changes towards a more industrialised process tree, and ‘took time and effort, but the results were okay’. The development work was carried out along with functional testing after the gap analysis was complete. And this was where the main stumbling blocks arose. The resources for this stage of the project were initially ranged in three camps: the bank, the supplier, and the project manager, Deloitte. ‘There was lots of tension, with everyone trying to prove that their point of view was the right one,’ says Freihat. The bank learned the lesson, and


brought the three camps together into one big team. ‘But it took us some time to reach that point,’ says Freihat. ‘It required strong knowledge of the whole of the system and the requirements of the bank,


36


and it required leadership, to bring all of the stakeholders together. There were tough decisions at certain points in time, just to clear up some issues that were controversial or disputed. But the moment we actually brought everyone together to work as one team serving one goal, we started to remove all the obstacles and get moving.’ By the time the project had reached


the integration testing, there were fewer disputes and the project was running smoother. The only notable conflict was over the number of test cycles to run. Deloitte felt that at least five or six were needed, but ICSFS’s position was that fewer would suffice. ‘I made the decision that since we were buying a package product, there was no need to go for functional or unit testing for each module and every service. What was needed was to test the functions that the users would perform and make sure that they were working fine. Once we made that decision, the testing went smoothly as well,’ says Freihat. The next stage of testing, UAT, was


carried out jointly with the data migration. ‘We ran the whole bank on the new system for a certain period of time, and then did the normal end-of-month and end-of-day processes to simulate the actual work,’ says Freihat. Two parallel runs were conducted at selected large branches. ‘We became pretty comfortable with the process of converting the data by the day of the cutover,’ he states. The designated date, 1st June 2014,


had been communicated to customers via adverts in national newspapers, and by SMS. ‘We had a complete track that


© IBS Intelligence 2015 www.ibsintelligence.com


was dealing with communication,’ says Freihat. The impact to each customer via each channel, such as ATM’s and internet banking, was elaborated. ‘We also prepared contingency plans. If a customer had an urgent need for cash, there would be a way to do that beforehand,’ he says. But the aim was to make sure the disruption to customers was minimal. ‘We made sure our ATM network remained available for most of the time.’ The critical factors in ensuring that


disruption would be minimised, and therefore that the project was a success, were making sure the data was correctly migrated, and that staff were adequately trained. If both of these things were accomplished, the chances were that there would be no complaints from customers. And Freihat states that, in the event, there were none. In terms of the benefits of the project,


the most striking is that the end-of-day process now takes 35 minutes instead of eight hours. This means that all the services that used to get disrupted by this, such as internet banking, are now much more reliable. ‘Channels really are 24x7 now, which is a major improvement.’ And the bank can start on its journey of launching new, modern products better suited to the 21st century. It has already launched a product which takes advantage of the new electronic bill payment and presentment gateway in the country. With the work that the Central Bank of Jordan is doing to build a new, real-time payments infrastructure and mobile switch, Jordan Kuwait Bank, with its freshly installed core, will be in an ideal position to prosper.


case study: jordan kuwait bank


Page 1  |  Page 2  |  Page 3  |  Page 4  |  Page 5  |  Page 6  |  Page 7  |  Page 8  |  Page 9  |  Page 10  |  Page 11  |  Page 12  |  Page 13  |  Page 14  |  Page 15  |  Page 16  |  Page 17  |  Page 18  |  Page 19  |  Page 20  |  Page 21  |  Page 22  |  Page 23  |  Page 24  |  Page 25  |  Page 26  |  Page 27  |  Page 28  |  Page 29  |  Page 30  |  Page 31  |  Page 32  |  Page 33  |  Page 34  |  Page 35  |  Page 36  |  Page 37  |  Page 38  |  Page 39  |  Page 40  |  Page 41  |  Page 42  |  Page 43  |  Page 44  |  Page 45  |  Page 46  |  Page 47  |  Page 48  |  Page 49  |  Page 50  |  Page 51  |  Page 52  |  Page 53  |  Page 54  |  Page 55  |  Page 56