Popular Financial - Streamlining the Organization and Creating Agility
OPM Experts LLC revolutionized Popular Financial’s project management framework, turning potential vulnerabilities into strengths. By redefining portfolio, program, and project management practices, OPM Experts LLC prepared Popular Financial to navigate the unpredictable, from pandemics to cyber threats, with agility and resilience. Our strategic overhaul streamlined governance, enhanced resource allocation across projects, and improved decision-making processes. This transformation increased the organization's agility, reduced systemic risks, and fortified the client’s capability to deliver impactful projects, setting a new standard for strategic execution in the financial sector.
“I brought OPM Experts LLC into my company to perform an assessment and help us improve our Project Management Office processes. They performed outstanding work and left us with a road map for improvement. They are extremely knowledgeable about the entire field of Project Management, and have particular expertise in transforming an organization’s ability to enact project-based strategies. If you are managing a PMO and want to raise your organization’s project, program, or portfolio management capability to a higher level, then they would be an excellent resource. Top qualities: Personable. Expert. High Integrity.”
Being smart about establishing effective ways to choose and deliver the right projects successfully (i.e. project-portfolio management) can produce efficiency break-through’s and growth opportunities in a complex and volatile environment.
Challenge
Popular Inc, based in Puerto Rico, is a financial holding company with four main subsidiaries: Banco Popular de Puerto Rico, the largest bank in Puerto Rico in terms of assets; Banco Popular North America, its banking operation in the continental United States; Evertec, a data processor; and Popular Financial Holdings, a diversified financial services company. Having executed acquisitions, mergers, and restructuring, PFH moved much of its activities into BPNA. The PMO was relatively new, and executives were interested in assessing PFH's portfolio, program, and project management capabilities, ensuring the PMO was designed to address emerging challenges and opportunities.
Solution
We distinguished the company’s strategic context and articulated how that context defined its focus on designing portfolio, program, and project management practices to mitigate Black Swan risks, which disaster planners call “long-tail” risks.
Black Swans are becoming more frequent as the world becomes more complex and interconnected, particularly in financial services, a sector that is at the very center of our global economy. Worse, Black Swan events “regress to the tail” – meaning that no matter how extreme a Black Swan event is, a more extreme one will eventually occur. For example, as bad as COVID-19 was, something worse will come along eventually. As bad as the most recent cyber attack or ransomware event was, something much worse will occur sooner or later. Take your pick of any kind of Black Swan, and know the most recent one won’t be the last one.
We helped our client realize that everyone is prone to “Black Swan blindness.” Our brains are not well suited for detecting extreme risks. Because we focus on the here and now and tend to discount the future, our biggest risk is us. For this reason, a key step in planning projects, programs, and portfolios is to embrace the fact that Black Swans are not predictable. You can count on some, such as pandemics and cyber attacks, happening at some point. But others will emerge completely out of the blue. Executives who don’t realize this are like a casino owner who thinks he has everything covered. The law of large numbers works in a casino; you always know what the average winning score is going to be, and that’s why the casino can make money. But that’s not the Black Swan. That is what is predictable. A Black Swan event for the casino might turn out to be the worst mass shooting in American history (like the one that killed 58 people in Vegas in 2017). That’s the difference.
Empowered by this kind of thinking, we helped our client redesign its portfolio, program, and project management practices, e.g. to perform at speed, operate within cost, and produce quality while reducing systemic risks and increasing resilience against random risks. We showed them how well-designed processes can improve flexibility, agility, and predictability at the same time. We performed an assessment of the PMO and the organizations served by the PMO and documented findings in a report that included specific and actionable recommendations for improving PFH's management functions to enact strategies prioritized by the C-level and BOD.
Results
On our recommendation, PFH streamlined duplicative governance structures. They implemented a system for project-based strategy implementation that could reallocate resources across project portfolios more efficiently, make project selection, prioritization, and termination decisions more capably, and deliver new projects with greater agility for greater benefits. The new structure improved their ability to deliver working products and services while simultaneously increasing the company’s resilience to random risk. By addressing highest risk areas first and driving regular reassessments, PFH increased the probability of success in the projects that enact its corporate strategies.