Business Support Team – Bridging the gap between End Users and System Capabilities

Is your business equipped to implement changes? A lot of organisations using investment management systems believe they are, but do they have the right skillsets in-house to actually analyse, design and implement them without external support?

It is no secret most organisations using investment management systems experience a knowledge gap between its business functions and the underlying software capabilities. In essence this require someone to assist translating the industry language used by the end users, and the system specific capabilities of the product.

This is not intended as being a negative aspect but merely a fact. End users working in an investment management system are responsible for the daily operational tasks required within their given business function. They know these well, but when it comes to changes and enhancements to the existing business processes, they often come up short as they don’t have the in-depth system knowledge required to analyse, design and implement the changes.

IT is often called upon and expected to handle such requests, but reality is IT resources tend to be highly technically skilled staff, more often focusing on integration between systems, accessing the backend via SQL, maintaining databases, infrastructure, services etc. Like functional business end users, they often lack in-depth system knowledge to make the required and not least correct changes to the configuration of the system.

Therefore, clients tend to revert to the system vendor for assistance to not only analyse and determine how a given business request should be resolved but also implementing the changes and enhancements. This get the business over the line, but a consequence is the end users are most often not much wiser and no better placed to take on similar requests in the future. Whilst per se there is nothing wrong with this approach, it can be expensive and doesn’t make the organisation self-reliant. Rather than improve the ability to enable change it is more often considered an obstacle, both from a monetary and timeline perspective.

What is the alternative?

The question to answer is what alternative organisations can consider making themselves more self-reliant going forward enabling them to investigate and resolve most common day-to-day issues and business requests in what is often considered a complex system.

In our experience, the establishment of a business support team is essential.  This team bridges the divide between the operational business users and system capabilities, enabling change and providing a first line of support. The gap between client and vendor support is substantially diminished.

As the name suggests, the business support team is responsible for supporting the functional business teams in their day-to-day operational running of the system ensuring the organisation is continuously getting the most out of the system. They are responsible for investigating and resolving questions and requests raised internally. Anything they are unable to solve is qualified by the team before requesting assistance from the vendor. The team generally reports to the operational business part of the organisation rather than IT but do have a dotted line as they work closely together in supporting technical aspects of the daily maintenance and running of the system.

The linking within the organisation is illustrated in the diagram below.

Examples of key responsibilities we see the business support team cover are:

• Daily business (BAU) support of end users, including IT where possible

• Enhancements to business workflows e.g. optimising workflows, developing new reports, extracts, imports etc.

• Business Development of a larger scale e.g. adding a new product/instrument, onboarding a new manager mandate, integrating with a new custodian or data provider etc.

• Functional testing as part of system upgrades

• Direct point of contact and liaison with system vendor support desk and services subscribed to

Team composition and competencies required

The size and composition of the business support team is dependent on both the size of the organisation and its usage of the investment management system. The more business functions in use, the wider range in competencies are required and the more staff are generally also required.

We have seen teams ranging from 2-3 and up to 8-12 business analysts to cover all functional competencies of the system. It is important to point out you should be looking for people with a business analyst mindset rather than generic operational staff. You need someone who is inquisitive, willing to learn a new system and isn’t afraid to think outside the box. It should be someone with technical capabilities being capable of dissecting a request/issue/problem into smaller pieces and putting the pieces of the puzzle together delivering optimal solutions to practical problems.

Whilst some degree of business knowledge is obviously required and implied here the point, we are trying to make is it is more important to find a candidate with a curious and analytical mindset as this is much harder to teach compared to any missing components of financial theory.

If you are starting from scratch, it’s not a bad idea to move a couple of SME’s from the business functions into the team as its core spine to bridge the initial business knowledge gap, at least temporarily. This is to ensure the team has a head start in understanding the existing business processes and workflows. Experience also shows it is favourable to match experienced SME’s with younger business analysts with open minds being adaptable to change and who are not afraid to take on new challenges. They tend to become knowledgeable and thereby adding value quickly as they easily absorb and take on system knowledge.

Depending on size and complexity, establishing a business support team requires significant effort and buy-in from higher up to be successful. The time to reach a self-reliant stage can range from a couple of months for a small/simple setup and up to a year or possibly more for a large/complex usage of the application.

While establishing this requires an initial investment, a well-executed implementation can yield substantial long-term benefits for the organization and its operations.

Value adding to the organisation

Having a well-functioning business support team in place drives continuous change, improvement and optimization to the organisation. It helps businesses increase their return of investments in several ways.

Firstly, by bringing forward backlogs and new initiatives. Secondly by eliminating the need for workarounds and thereby possibly reducing head count, and maybe most importantly facilitating change.

Lastly, with the right blend of business analysts complementing each other across system, business, and industry knowledge and experience, there are always projects going on, small or large, which will have a positive effect on the team. They can witness firsthand small projects being executed and improve their sense of contribution and satisfaction in seeing projects through from start to finish. This creates loyal employees with energy, which rubs off on the business and organization as a whole. Their business knowledge continues to grow with the projects as well as their efficiency. Managements trust in project timelines and execution capabilities are likely enhanced as well as budget accuracy improvements.

How can Dimensional Community help?

Dimensional Community has worked with many clients globally using investment management systems. Our experience shows that organisations who have a business support function in place along the lines of the above tend to be more self-reliant and more adaptable to change compared to those who have not. We have observed a significant time reduction in time to market for implementing changes as well as reduced overall costs in the long term.

We assist in the process of establishing such a team. We provide advice on team size, composition and competencies depending on the organisation size and usage of the system. We help document business processes, write guidelines and FAQ documents for daily use by the team, and when onboarding new staff. We help train the team to the individual needs of each business function.

We offer a flexible approach being onsite alongside the team members supporting them in the early stages of the process when establishing the team ensuring they build the required system knowledge and understand the business processes they support. Later on, we move to a hybrid (partly or fully remote) model providing ad-hoc guidance and support when needed. We also provide guidance and assistance on how to qualify defects and what should be provided when raising them with the vendor support desk to ensure the issue is easily understood by the vendor, a process you can see in action in this client testimonial.

If you have questions or would like to discuss this in more detail, please get in touch with our team.