Programme Planning for a Treasury and Capital Markets Carve-out

A treasury and capital markets business in the process of carving out from its much larger financial services parent following a private equity buyout. The client had committed to complete separation of all IT and operations capability within twelve months, but had only aspirational planning in place at the point Refractis was brought in.

Refractis was engaged for a rapid, focused four-week programme planning exercise. Working directly with each work stream lead, we translated skeleton plans into a fully executable programme plan that the client could defend at board level and use as the baseline for third-party delivery partners. Along the way we:

• Built detailed plans for each of the separation work streams, including service desk, ITSM tooling, desktop services, application management, and data centre separation
• Mapped dependencies across all work streams into a coherent end-to-end programme plan
• Identified and documented the critical path, including key milestones such as Active Directory establishment and cross-domain synchronisation
• Built a full RAID log capturing risks, assumptions, issues and dependencies with clear ownership
• Re-baselined the target date against the newly credible plan and presented the outcome at CIO level for executive endorsement
• Delivered the finished plan as the baseline that third-party providers could scope and deliver against

Refractis completed the engagement within its four-week mandate. The client moved from an aspirational board date with limited underlying substance to a fully executable programme plan of several hundred detailed tasks per work stream, with dependencies mapped, critical path identified, and risks documented against each milestone. The revised target date moved marginally, but for the first time was defensible on the basis of credible detail rather than ambition.

The plan also served as the baseline for engagement with multiple third-party providers, giving the client a firm reference point from which to scope, direct and challenge supplier delivery. What had previously been a date without a plan became a plan with a date, and the client could execute against it with confidence.