Financial Information Company
Scenario
Management of the client's millennium compliance programme
Situation
The client is one of the world leaders in supplying the global
financial markets and the news media with a wide range
of information and news products including real-time financial
data, collective investment data, numerical, textual,
historical and graphical databases plus news, graphics
video, and pictures. The client also designs and installs
enterprise-wide information management and risk management
systems for the financial markets and provides equity
and foreign exchange transaction systems.
The programme's objective was to ensure that millennium issues
were addressed in all products, operations and internal
processes of the group including subsidiaries, and to
ensure that business operations continued normally across
the millennium transition.
This involved addressing millennium issues across many
thousands of installed client site applications, and central
systems, and included liaison with 4000 key suppliers
of hardware, software and services, and 7000 client contribution
and news sources.
Charteris Role
To run this programme, the client needed a very high level
of programme management expertise, and a practical and
sensitive approach to the organisation.
The client Millennium compliance director commented: "Our
aim was to gain access to best programme practice by gearing
up from Charteris experience of advising other companies
on millennium programmes"
A Charteris consultant was appointed as programme manager
to the central Millennium compliance group; he first provided
advice on the structure of the overall programme, and
then defined, monitored and controlled the programme execution
to a very tight timescale. The Millennium organisation
also allowed for a balance between a central programme
office and the distribution of activities across the company
departments globally and subsidiaries.
Charteris also worked on business continuity planning for the Millennium
transition, including:
- contingency planning
- establishment of a command centre to monitor activities
- management of simulation exercises to ensure effective running of the command centres
- the development of intranet tools for global monitoring of pro-active millennium checks
Solution
All products, applications, services and business processes
were made compliant in time, and the year 2000 transition
passed without any significant issues.
On completion of the programme, the global millennium director
commented: "Our millennium programme was seen as
successful both internally and by our customers, and Charteris
must take a great deal of the credit for its success.
Charteris were highly responsive to our requests at all
times, and provided quality advice and work throughout
the programme. Charteris met our expectations in every
respect"