Many of us have been working from home for a while now and are getting used to operating “business as usual” from home. However, have you tried to change something in your reports? Perhaps responding to a client request or a new standard that’s been agreed internally.
If you have tried to change something, did it feel sluggish? Are the reporting enhancements taking too long to implement? Perhaps even longer than before the “work from home” rule. Is the enhancements list getting longer and longer and delivery getting slower? Are the clients getting frustrated? Are you getting frustrated? Is there more and more manual reporting?
Sound familiar? Do you wish your reporting could be nimble again, and deliver reporting improvements and enhancements without a long delay and a lot of internal effort and haggling?
What’s really going wrong?
Most investment firms who run reporting internally suffer from slow turnaround of reporting enhancements and improvements. There are many reasons for this, including:
- Competing priorities within IT and project teams
- Lack of requisite skills
- Lack of budget
- Unnecessarily complex sign off and delivery process
Any of these reasons can cause delays to delivering enhancements, benefits and improvements to your clients, and often the lack of progress with automated reporting solutions means that manual effort has to be expended to produce the report outside of the core systems. This brings additional risk, delay and cost to the reporting process and more work to the reporting team. The work from home initiative makes coordination between multiple teams even harder and slows delivery further.
The real issue here is the business operating model.
Clients are the most important asset of any firm – they pay the fees. Yet many firms are slow to deliver benefits to clients because of internal conflicts with other departments and other internal pressures. Client reporting enhancements often get prioritised behind “regulatory” or “front office” updates – which we can all understand, but firms really need to do both AND at the same time.
Investment firms who embrace new ways of working; bringing cloud-based solutions into their operating model and engaging with domain experts who provide required levels of service are doing just that. Client reporting is a great example of an area where an investment firm should engage with a cloud-based solution and a domain-expert organisation.
Reporting as a Service is a cloud-based client reporting solution which allows for enhancements and updates to be made and implemented without any conflict with the internal resources, other priorities and IT/Project teams. The changes are made, tested and delivered to the reporting team by domain experts – with no delays or conflict.
Next time your client reporting enhancements are delayed behind another project – don’t blame the IT or project teams – it’s not their fault – it’s just the wrong business operating model. Embrace the cloud for your client reporting – get reporting enhancements delivered in hours or a couple of days, NOT weeks or months. Be nimble again!
To learn more about becoming nimble and simplifying your operating model, click here to visit our Operational Simplicity page. Watch our latest 90 second video and discover our new infographics.