Electronic Document Management System (EDMS) Upgrade

Situation

Recently ranked No. 3 on the Wall Street Journal’s “Best on the Street” Analysts Survey, Raymond James and its Canadian subsidiary, Raymond James Ltd. is one of Canada’s leading, full-service, investment dealers. EDMS had been implemented 5 years ago to enable electronic capture and storage of client documents and retrieval by internal staff in support of client interactions. Due to the customizations performed during the initial implementation, ongoing product upgrades to the IBM components of the system (Content Manager) and the Kofax scanning software were not made based on the cost/benefit. IBM was about to discontinue support for the version of Content Manager currently in use at Raymond James. As the system was critical to most business areas, it was decided to initiate a project to upgrade IBM’s Content Manager and the Kofax scanning software to the most current versions.

Business Challenge

Between the initial implementation and the planned upgrade, IBM’s Content Manager product suite had undergone significant changes. This particularly affected the interfaces with the customized components of the application as well as the interaction with the Kofax scanning sub-system. All staff involved with the original implementation had left Raymond James and the amount of supporting documentation was limited, presenting a considerable challenge in effectively planning the project. The project required considerable coordination and communication since it involved two vendors and a number of different internal technical groups within IT department.

Solution

Raymond James engaged KLR due to KLR’s extensive project management best practices. The project plan developed contained input from vendors and all RJL internal team members to ensure completeness. This included: detailed activities for upgrading the development environment, assessment and potential re-development of all customized components, upgrade of Kofax scanning modules, creation of a new production environment, extensive system, user and acceptance testing and detailed activities required to perform the final cutover.

The project required very close monitoring to ensure the schedule was maintained since there were significant areas of uncertainty associated with upgrading the customized components. Weekly status meetings and daily informal updates were used to monitor progress. As clarity occurred there was constant impact to the schedule. In support of this challenge a number of problem resolution sessions were held to come up with creative solutions. In one example key team members were gathered to work on shortening the schedule without increasing risk and cost. The solution was to have the vendor responsible for the Kofax scanning software upgrade review the customizations related to those components (rather than Raymond James staff) since they knew the basic scanning software. As a result the re-estimated effort to address the scanning customizations was significantly less than originally planned.

Project risks were assessed bi-weekly. This proved valuable on a number of occasions where risk events occurred and were mitigated successfully. For example, a key interface file was discovered “missing” in an area of the system that was unknown to team members making resolution a significant problem. The mitigation plan to engage the support of the vendor involved in the original implementation (not one of the current vendors) was invoked and the problem was resolved within 4 hours – it would have taken days or weeks for the team to resolve this problem.

Results

The original project scope was successfully implemented along with a new significant function providing an additional electronic form type for the financial advisors to be added into EDMS. The original project schedule was estimated to be 11 months. Through creatively resolving issues and effectively managing project progress, the actual work effort was reduced by one elapsed month resulting in savings of both internal personnel time and external vendor services. The system tests included a number of iterations of functional, load and performance testing. Through the effective coordination of all parties, problems were quickly resolved and user and acceptance testing was completed. All this was completed in an environment where all team members were working on multiple, concurrent projects.

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