Prairie Horizon Bank
A smaller bank located in Western Canada that offers a full suite of business, small business, and personal banking options.
The Need:
Prairie Horizon Bank has a small Wealth Management arm that has been expanded across eastern Canada through the acquisition of several small boutique investment firms. Over the past four years, PHB has been working on reconciling brands, pay scales, roles, and services to bring the acquired firms under the Prairie Horizon Bank Wealth Management banner. The final step in this process of alignment was to bring all the wealth management employees onto a single Client Relationship Management system (CRM) and a single Portfolio Management System (PMS). Phase 2 of the initiative would bring full integration between the CRM and the PMS.
Challenges:
As with most technology projects, delays and changing timelines happened frequently
Regular turnover of project team members, including program manager and other project members
Less than a month before the project deadline, PHB shelved the plans for the PMS due to a lack of responsiveness from the vendor
Some user groups for the CRM were not initially identified and training solutions had to be created after the training plan had been developed
Solution:
Spellcast Consulting developed a comprehensive, integrated training and communications strategy designed to focus on the employee development needs, ensuring effective knowledge transfer, and bringing users onto the new systems in a supported and personalized way.
The communications strategy was simple and to the point:
o regular updates from the inbox of the project’s executive sponsor to provide employees with positive, upbeat missives about the progress of the project, and to highlight any key action items
o additional updates from the project team to communicate key dates (freeze periods, data migration etc.), and action items that users will need to complete
A multi-faceted, blended learning strategy was created.
o To provide ongoing access to the training, a new, dedicated page was developed on the PHB intranet site. This page would house all potential learning materials created throughout the project
o To meet the wide range of learner needs, each group would be offered live, virtual training sessions. These sessions would orient users to the systems and show them their role-based workflows. These sessions would allow for questions from the learners, and the project team would be on hand to respond.
o To provide detailed, step-by-step instruction of the majority of day-to-day tasks for each group, a library of comprehensive job aids would be created.
Outcomes
When the CRM was finally ready to launch Spellcast Consulting rolled out their comprehensive training plan. The final training solution was a total of 11 live, virtual sessions facilitated over the span a of five days covering all the various groups.
These sessions were incredibly well attended and in total Spellcast Consulting achieved an attendance rate of over 87%. After the successful launch of the CRM, Spellcast Consulting continued to provide ongoing learning support during the two-week, post-launch hyper care phase. This included ad hoc live, virtual training sessions as requested by the business, and additional job aids where required.