In this course, you'll be playing the role of a freelance consultant contacted by a new client, a network of bank branches specializing in retail banking: Global Bank.
Employees at Global Bank have noticed that:
Mortgage-application files are of varying quality across their network of branches.
The length of time it takes to make a decision on whether to approve or reject a mortgage application is far too long.
Your point of contact, the recently-appointed project manager, is Jane. She wants to brief you on a project but isn’t sure how to get started.
The Scope of Your Project With Jane
Jane calls you in to speak about her project.
Here is how your conversation could go—take notes to try to analyze her request! 😉
In summary, Jane has two goals:
To reduce the time it takes to decide whether to approve mortgage applications.
To improve the quality of approved application files.
She describes several people who play a role in the decision-making chain for mortgages:
In-branch advisors who do not currently have the necessary decision-making tools, and must rely on their experience.
Branch managers who can confirm or overrule a decision made by the advisors.
The central unit for examining mortgage applications. This unit has the final say but is overwhelmed with requests.
Jane mentions that the root cause of the delay in decision-making is the amount of information about the borrower that needs to be examined in order to approve or refuse a mortgage:
Professional situation (socio-professional category, employment status, regularity of income, and amount).
Family circumstances (age, number of dependent children).
Down payment amount.
Debt currently held.
Savings capacity (cost of living).
All of this information is contained within databases that don’t “speak” to each other, and all of the work goes on in the heads of the branch advisors and by hand in the central unit.
After your initial conversation, you and Jane agree that creating a dashboard might be a good solution. This would allow branch advisors to consult a mortgage score for their customers, working out with just a few clicks of the mouse whether a mortgage seems feasible. This would save precious time when assessing applications and would mean only quality applications were sent to the central mortgage-application unit.
Why is this a case for applying business intelligence tools?
Jane’s problem is similar to those we mentioned earlier.
Remember:
Reconciling data: To resolve Global Bank’s problem, you’ll going to need to reconcile all of the information about the decision-making process that Jane mentioned (professional situation, familial status, down payment size, etc.) in a dashboard to calculate the mortgage score—this is the key advantage of business intelligence tools.
Working at scale: Let’s say a bank like Global Bank has over a million customers - which would make them a mid-sized bank in many countries. We’re going to have to work with a large amount of data to provide a mortgage score for each customer.
Cleaning up data: Jane talked about the need to automatically clean up data in order to link different tables.
These three conditions make this assignment an excellent opportunity for using Microsoft Power BI.
Beware of Ready-Made Solutions
There are certain traps that it’s all too easy to fall into. Be sure to avoid the following pitfalls:
Apply Best Practices to Set Your Project Scope
Before diving into your dashboard project, here are a few classic examples of best practices that I use. These are applicable regardless of the project method (PMI, SCRUM, design thinking, etc.).
Best Practice No. 1: Meet the End Users
Take the time to meet with the end users to understand:
How they work on a daily basis.
How your project will serve their needs.
This way, you can be sure to start off on the right foot!
Best Practice No. 2: Meet With Stakeholders
Organize a scoping workshop with representatives from each group of users and your client to set the parameters for your work before starting.
During this workshop, you could share summaries of your interviews with end users and the client’s initial scoping ideas.
The goal is to ensure that the whole group is on the same page about:
The scope of the project.
The benchmarks for success.
Project organization.
Project schedule.
Best Practice No. 3: Create User Stories
Here’s the user story that you can create as part of your mortgage project with Jane:
There are lots of different ways to respond to a single need, and you want to keep things open at this point. Also, it is impossible to:
Attach the need to a group of users when it is worded like this.
Not prioritize the development of this function over another, which might add more value.
Best Practice No. 4: Use examples to Help the Group Visualize
During the scoping workshop, show the group examples of similar dashboards.
The hardest thing for your future users to do during the scoping stage is imagine what they’ll use your dashboard for because they’ve never seen it!
Best Practice No. 5: Prototype the Solution With a Wireframe
In this final stage of your scoping workshop (which I particularly enjoy), you’ll ask the group to sketch out, with your help, what their ideal dashboard would look like, using a sharpie and A1 or A0 paper.
Below are the user stories that correspond to the identified needs following the Global Bankscoping workshop:
Branch Advisor (BA) | User story 1: As a BA, I want to be able to visualize mortgage applications for my branch that have not been processed so I can prioritize my work. | User story 2: As a BA, I want to visualize a complete customer profile (family circumstances or professional situation, down payment, etc.) so I can form an opinion on their borrowing potential. | User story 3: As a BA, I want to have help to make quick decisions, so I can decide whether I should accept or reject a mortgage application. |
Branch Manager (BM) | User story 4: As a BM, I want to have the option of being alerted to real-estate transactions over $250,000 to examine the file. | User story 5: As a BM, I want to see past mortgage applications received and approved by my branch, to monitor whether our business volume is in line with forecasts. | User story 6: As a BM, I want to be able to analyze the make-up of my mortgage portfolio by socio-professional status so I can monitor whether we are positioning ourselves correctly. |
Central mortgage unit (CU) | User story 7: As the CU, I want the performance across the network (average transaction amount, rate of applications granted) to monitor whether business is in line with forecasts. | User story 8: As the CU, I want to monitor past mortgage transactions to steer daily operations within the branches. | User story 9: As the CU, I want to see branch performance (rate of applications approved, number of files), so I can step in when branches are underperforming in terms of the quantity and quality of applications. |
This gives you a basic sketch of your future dashboard (wireframe).
For this project for Global Bank, we’ll have a home page that contains user instructions, from which users can access three pages:
Global indicators.
Branch performance.
Indicators and search page.
Best Practice No. 6: Organize Regular Progress Reports
Regular update sessions will ensure you:
Have your dashboard approved at each stage of the process.
Don’t waste weeks of development by realizing too late that your starting hypothesis was wrong.
Let’s Recap!
Take time to talk with end users to gather and understand their needs.
Document the features they want with user stories.
Organize a scoping workshop to ensure everyone is on the same page about the project parameters and the benchmarks for success.
Use example dashboards to help your client visualize the end result.
We’ve come to the end of the first part. It’s time for a quiz before we move onto the next part!
