Client Background
The client is amongst the largest banks in Oman and had selected a new CRM platform to transform how its retail teams view customers, manage sales and prospects, handle service requests and complaints, and run marketing campaigns across branches, the contact centre and tablets. The programme involved the bank's business and IT teams, a regional implementation partner and several third-party component providers, each with its own contracts and dependencies. Without firm scope control, the gap between what had been promised at RFP stage and what would be built risked turning into a stream of change requests and schedule slippage. Cedar was appointed to run the programme management office and governance for the implementation.
Cedar’s Approach
Cedar applied a structured PMO and governance model built on tiered forums, a programme working group, a programme management committee, a change control board and a steering committee, supported by a consistent dashboard, action tracker, contract tracker and risk register.
Governance Set-Up and Mobilisation – Cedar established the governance forums, tracked hardware and environment readiness, office logistics and bank resourcing, and monitored the signing of critical, essential and ancillary contracts, including licensing and escrow arrangements with the implementation partner and its sub-vendors.
Requirements Workshops and FRD Sign-Off – Cedar coordinated business analysis workshops covering 363 requirements in five days with 25 bank staff, then drove a structured sign-off process for the functional requirements documents across four modules: Customer 360, Sales and Prospect Management, Service Requests and Complaints, and Marketing.
Scope and Change Control – For each module, Cedar reconciled RFP requirements with the agreed scope, classifying items as out of the box, configuration, customisation or change request. Every potential change request was rationalised using Vital, Essential and Desirable priority and complexity, then taken to the change control board as do, defer or drop, with workarounds or vendor absorption pursued before new development was approved.
Design Alignment, Risk and Planning – Cedar ran a parallel plan for high-level technical design alignment, the number of workflows, APIs and reports, and integration decisions such as the SMS gateway approach, while maintaining a risk register with mitigations and a Release 1 plan culminating in a formal tollgate before build.
Strategic Outcome and Way Forward
The PMO gave bank leadership a single, transparent view of scope, contracts, risks and decisions. Scope for the first modules was finalised with the large majority of requirements met out of the box or absorbed by the vendor and only a small number of change requests approved, while marketing requirements were streamlined through workshop analysis and change request rationalisation. Critical contracts were concluded, and delays in document sign-off were surfaced early and managed through daily follow-up and weekly escalation.
As the way forward, Cedar recommended build approval for Customer 360 and Sales and Prospect Management, an agreed approach for service requests, and closure of the remaining sign-offs and technical design alignment ahead of the tollgate decision that would release the build, testing and cutover phases of Release 1.