Author:Hengky MulyonoA web application that helps the IT division of a national commercial bank manage and monitor projects from initiation to go live. Stages, documents, testing, releases, issues and discussion live in one place, every important step goes through approval, and dashboards give a view of all projects across the bank.
Counters for projects, change requests and production issues, progress by status and average progress by priority appear in cards and charts that are easy to read. The same dashboards show timeline alerts and document updates.
Each project has one entry point to its information, members, stages, issues, discussion, documents, testing, release and audit trail.
Initiation, progress updates, documents, test requests, test reports, release requests and stopping a project all go through makers, checkers and approvers. Each can leave a rejection note.
Phases and stages show their weight, progress and status. Progress changes only after it is approved.
Before a stage opens or closes, the application checks that earlier stages and mandatory documents are complete.
The project team, business owner and responsible person are registered per project, with their division and role.
Approved documents are stored by type with their versions, and every version can be downloaded.
A request carries a document checklist, quality assurance approval, a schedule and tester assignment.
Daily reports summarise how far the test scripts have run and what passed or failed, and go through the same checking and approval.
The final report is checked and approved step by step up to the project manager, with the whole approval timeline beside it.
A release request follows the same flow as testing, and every change and approval is logged in the audit trail.
This is a project management application we built for the IT division of a national commercial bank. It follows a project from the first proposal to go live in one place: stages and progress, documents, testing, release management, issues and discussion, with dashboards that show all projects across the bank.
This write-up covers why the bank needed it, what the application does, how a project moves through it and how the work was approached.
The bank had no project management tool. Recording initiatives, planning work and resources, requesting tests, preparing reports and the other administration around a project was done by hand. Some of those activities had their own applications, but they stood alone, so a consolidated report or an overall view of the portfolio of projects was hard to produce.
Manual administration invites mistakes, and a project that is not tracked well can drift without anyone noticing. The bank wanted one application that follows its internal IT procedures and acts as the project database for the whole bank.
| Module | What it does |
|---|---|
| Settings | General and email settings, holidays, roles and accounts, and reference data such as directorates, divisions, departments, classification, priority and document types. |
| Project initiation | New projects by form or Excel upload, checked and approved by IT planning and the project management office. |
| Project management | The project cockpit, information, members, stages and progress, documents, issues and discussion. |
| Drop project | A staged request and approval to stop a project. |
| Testing | Test requests, daily testing and the final test report. |
| Release management | Release requests, scheduling and quality assurance approval. |
| Reports and dashboards | Progress, Gantt chart, per-stage progress, testing, tester resources, test requests, test status and release reports, with dashboards for projects, testing, release, IT planning and the project management office. |
| Audit trail | Activity and approval logs. |
At each step the person who made the change, the person who checked it and the person who approved it are all on record.
| Step | What happened |
|---|---|
| Kick-off | Scope, roles, security expectations, delivery rhythm and the approach were agreed with the bank’s IT division. The team used rapid application development. |
| Prototype first | A first stage focused on the business process and a prototype, to confirm the flows with the people who would use them. |
| Refinement | A second stage focused on bug fixing, features and interface improvements. |
| Specification | The specification grew from the base flows to the reporting module, then absorbed the review findings and the references to the bank’s own procedures. Backup, restore and migration steps were added. |
| Handover | The bank received the source code, the specification, internal test documents, migration and technical documentation and a user guide. |
The first phase covered project management, testing, release management and the dashboards. The structure leaves room for sub-projects and other types of project later.
Projects now live in one source of truth. The requirements of a stage are visible before anyone starts it, approvals follow the same pattern from initiation to release, and a manager can go from a dashboard chart to the project behind it without asking for a report.
If your IT division manages projects across spreadsheets and separate tools, our enterprise software development page describes how we approach projects like this one.
DISCLAIMER:
To protect client confidentiality, all data displayed, including names, numbers, identifiers, values, and the length, structure, and format of such data, has been replaced with fictitious data, randomized, or obscured, and does not reflect any client's actual data or systems. No inference about any client's actual data, systems, or business information should be drawn from these materials. Any resemblance to actual persons, organizations, or data is purely coincidental.
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