High Worth Project
In November 2006 Bank of America acquired US Trust; this was with the aspirations that Bank of America would get a stronger foothold to enhance their Private Banking portfolio, which serviced the ultra-wealthy. A part of this acquisition was to bring all of US Trust’s proprietary computer systems that manage client’s investments and trust account data into TrustWeb, which was Bank of America’s proprietary database. Bank of America had just made the decision to utilize TrustWeb because they had just made significant investments. They also considered the contracts and number of employees it would affect in the TrustWeb system, so they decided that they could merge two existing US Trust systems (PMW+ and AMS) into their own. However, TrustWeb lacked functionality that US Trust associates were accustomed to having, which helped them provide customer service to their clients. TrustWeb was in need of updates because multiple systems were necessary to complete the tasks US Trust could easily, but if these ‘gaps’ were not addressed there would be a lack of associate’s abilities to meet the level of customer service that US Trust clients became accustomed to over the years. The key players in TrustWeb were, Ken Lewis was CEO of Bank of America and Brian Moynihan, President of the Global Wealth Management segment. Next was the Transition Leadership Team (TLT) headed by Robert Sandberg, and Peter Santos was the change execution lead for the integration of all client facing tools, of which one was TrustWeb. Mike Morris was the PM; he had two direct reports who were more junior change analysts as well as a Tech Lead who was responsible for taking business requirements and turning them into functional systems. This was not in keeping with the way BOA ran projects, the higher the priority the more dollars and resources a PM was to have at their disposal, which didn’t happen in this particular case.
The project had some fundamental issues from the start of which the PM
The project had some fundamental issues from the start of which the PM