Using Client-Side Resourcing to Get Your Project Completed

The Problem: During large projects, you need to lean on your staff’s capabilities harder than perhaps they’re able to manage. The gaps may not be entirely obvious: staff need to prioritize their regular work over project work; even when you’ve dedicated some operations staff to a project, there’s a limited amount of resource shifting you can do. How do you fill this resource gap?

The Solution: Using Client-Side Resourcing (CSR) to supply your team with experts that can fill in when you do not have enough of your own.

The two differences between CSR and staff augmentation:

1. With CSR, resources frequently do not stay on for an open-ended period. Their tenure is goal-based, and targeted.

2. The additional resources brought on are experts in their respective areas.

- These resources not only have the requisite pension or insurance business experience, but they also come with expertise in project management, business analysis, testing, training, or technical writing.

Filling in Organizational Gaps in Training

What we see: Clients bring on a training expert for a project and realize early on that their organization does not have the expertise needed. That expert – who now possesses a deeper knowledge of the pension fund – can create an organizational training plan to better assist them.

The next step: The expert can help build a training department for the organization, which will help develop the skills of their existing staff.

 Another area we’ve seen gaps in is Project Management (PM).

 Bringing on a PM expert can help:

- Build out a PMO for the client

- Develop a methodology to create a steering committee

Testing and Going Beyond Vendor Datasets

Organizations are frequently short-handed when it comes to having enough testers. They get to the end of a long project cycle that they can no longer complete.

How they get over the goal line: With a test plan written by an expert with pension fund experience.

The wrong test plan is… built by the vendor using clean data sets that smooth out edge cases. Data in real life is never clean.

The right test plan is… built with comprehensive data set from the production environment and includes edges cases.

Examples of Edge Cases:

- Members whose purchase of service credits were partially fulfilled

- Conversion issues where data was sufficient in the legacy system, but insufficient in the new system

The bottom line: Adding expert resources to a project is an important option for every pension fund to consider.

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