How Does the Financial Securities Industry Build Its Intelligent R&D Management System?

Original

"The credit card in the future will definitely break away from the medium of the plastic card and be replaced by the mobile phone." This is a prediction made by the then president of China Merchants Bank fifteen years ago. Fifteen years later, technologies such as big data, blockchain, and artificial intelligence have profoundly changed customer behavior and the financial service model: Business platforms for personal finance, account transactions, settlement, and fund custody have gradually shifted to mobile banking and credit card apps. This has brought considerable challenges to the project management process of the financial securities industry: Products are often out of touch with the market, and market demand is easily overlooked.

These situations require a faster response speed; business logic is complex, business needs are changeable, and more compliant demand management is required; strict regulatory compliance requirements and high security requirements call for more complete management processes; it is difficult to process and manage massive amounts of data, requiring higher-quality and automated data analysis capabilities. Against this backdrop, what are the common dilemmas faced by the financial industry? And what project management solutions can ZenTao provide for it?

I. The "Three Highs" Characteristics of Project Management in the Financial Industry

Before providing solutions, let's first take a look at the characteristics of project management in the financial industry:

1. High Compliance and Strong Supervision

Products and services in the financial system must strictly comply with a series of regulations such as the Commercial Bank Law and the Measures for the Compliance Management of Financial Institutions. The compliance review should also run through the entire life cycle of the product from design to launch, involving multi-party collaboration of risk control, legal affairs, compliance. Therefore, the primary task of project management is to ensure the stable operation of the business within the compliance framework, and secondly, to ensure the safety of customer information and funds.

2. High Collaboration and Multiple Product Lines

Projects in this industry usually require close cooperation among multiple departments such as products, technology, risk control, and legal affairs. At the same time, core products such as the credit card system and the payment and settlement platform involve numerous business and technical modules, and the product lines are relatively complex.

3. High Investment and Long Cycle

In the financial industry, the business logic of products is complex, and product R&D cycle often exceed half a year or even longer. This requires industry institutions to carry out long-term capital planning and resource allocation. Even so, long-cycle projects still face many uncertainties such as technological updates and changes in requirements during the execution process. Moreover, high investment means that once a project fails or deviates, institutions will bear huge economic losses. Facing these complex characteristics, the financial industry urgently needs more advanced and flexible project management solutions to improve R&D efficiency.

II. Practical Paths for Efficiency Leap: ZenTao Solutions

To promote the successful digital and intelligent transformation of the industry and advance the reform of its own R&D project management, ZenTao provides more targeted and adaptable solutions for the financial industry.

1. Building a Bridge for Collaboration and Communication Among Departments

Facing the scenario of full collaboration among multiple departments, ZenTao completely covers the entire life cycle of project management, integrating functions such as product management, project management, DevOps, quality management, document management, organizational management, and transaction management.

• Product Planning: Plan the R&D requirements of the system at the product level and formulate detailed release schedules, so as to clarify the development rhythm within the team and ensure the orderly progress of all work.
• Plan Execution: The project manager follows up the R&D process according to the plan and manages the scope and progress of the current iteration. Through project management tools such as burn-down charts and Gantt charts provided by ZenTao, one can clearly understand the project progress, adjust the plan in a timely manner, and ensure the smooth progress of the project.
• R&D Process Follow-up: The technical manager uses ZenTao to follow up the development progress, verify development tasks, and conduct code reviews to ensure code quality. After the development is completed, package the version, clarify the completed requirements and fixed bugs, create test orders and submit them to the testing team to achieve seamless connection between the development and testing links.
• Test Management: After receiving the test order, the test leader executes the relevant test cases in ZenTao and promptly feedbacks the problems existing in the version.
• Delivery Verification: Through the version management function of ZenTao, the project manager manages the delivery version and submits it to the system leader. The system leader then organizes the online release work to ensure the accuracy and timeliness of version delivery, and thus ensure that the product goes live on time.

Under the management system of ZenTao, regardless of the project stage, it can achieve visualization, traceability, and trackability. At the same time, through the complete API interface of ZenTao, seamless connection with major internal systems of the financial industry can be realized. It meets the diverse needs of financial institutions such as banks to connect and dock multiple internal systems, and promotes data circulation and collaborative operation among systems.

2. Embedding Full-process Implementation Practices

In the management process, ZenTao organically integrates seven mainstream management model frameworks and methods, including IPD (Integrated Product Development), large-scale agile, CMMI (Capability Maturity Model Integration), Scrum, Kanban, waterfall, and DevOps, to meet the needs of different management scenarios in project management. Major financial institutions can flexibly select suitable management models according to the characteristics and needs of specific projects through various management models built into ZenTao. For projects that need to quickly respond to market changes and develop products through iterative and incremental methods, introducing an agile management model is the best choice.

The agile project management model can help financial institutions launch new products or functions more quickly, meet business needs, and significantly improve the adaptability and efficiency of project management. For projects with relatively stable requirements, long project cycles, and clear requirements for phased results, a project baseline can be established through the waterfall management model, and the deviation between the project baseline and the actual execution can be regularly checked to timely discover and control high-level problems and risks.

3. An Integrated DevOps Platform Helps the R&D Process Take Off

To improve the R&D efficiency of project management in the financial industry and realize the end-to-end value realization from demand to delivery, ZenTao provides an efficient and cost-effective DevOps platform. By deploying ZenTao, the entire process from product R&D project management to tool support can be connected, and the close combination of cloud-native, containers, automation, agility, open-source applications, and DevOps can be realized, providing comprehensive R&D management functions for R&D personnel, project managers, and managers.

4. Customized Approval Flows Adapt to More Scenario Needs

Through the differential configuration of product process templates and project process templates, the compliance review link can be embedded in the project management approval process, so as to standardize the approval process and achieve the compliance management of the project. Institutions can adapt different approval processes according to their own projects at different levels: For some projects with high budgets and high risks, strict multi-level approvals can be adopted to control costs and reduce risks; for other relatively simple projects, the approval process can be simplified accordingly.

5. Intelligent Analysis of R&D Efficiency Helps with Scientific Decision-making

In the current stock era, data is an asset. The ZenTao BI (Business Intelligence) large screen can automatically and intuitively summarize and display various project data, providing a clearer basis for decision-making for managers, and further improving the refinement level and overall efficiency of project management.

At the same time, by customizing the large screen, the process of data collation, screening, and charting can be simplified, and the automation of data processing can be realized, providing accurate data support for project decision-making, promoting data measurement and process improvement, and reducing labor costs. Through this data-driven management model, the financial industry can accurately capture the previously overlooked data value, so as to have a deeper understanding of user needs and provide targeted and differentiated financial products and services. With comprehensive and powerful project management solutions, it helps the digital transformation of the financial industry! In the future, the ZenTao project management software will continue to optimize and innovate, bringing more value to enterprises and helping project management reach a higher level.