I have taken on a new project that is a great opportunity and very intimidating. The opportunity is to launch a new product for the firm, generating about $1m per month. Intimidating because I have so little experience in the field, and am working with nearly every executive in the firm.
So here is the situation: the firm launches products all the time, and they never go smoothly. There are many departments involved, but nobody has holistic ownership of the results. So the portfolio managers typically run the launches, but they don't organize the launch team or coordinate the tasks. The finish line then is a fire drill, to the point where our clients have seen some ugliness. This time, the PM department wants it to go better, and I am managing the launch.
This product launch started about 4 months ago with a new PM getting the ball rolling. Our first task was to get smart enough about how to trade the product, to inventory our experience, and to explore how to structure the product from a legal perspective. The finish line was board approval of the concept. From start to milestone took about 2.5 months, mostly portfolio manager time.
Next, we decided we needed to hire a new portfolio manager who had experience with this type of product. We posted the position in mid Jan and will probably have someone on staff by mid March.
Right now, the main tasks are answering outstanding questions - what kind of legal entity (ie a new company) will be the most tax advantageous, should the fund be registered or unregistered, which partner firm should manage fund accounting and transfer agency functions.
Some of my big obstacles are related to managing across functions. The PM group just wants to do their part, and they don't expect to have much discussion across departments. Though they are sponsoring the project, they only feel ownership of their part. I am fully responsible for anything that needs to happen across functions, but I don't understand those touchpoints yet.
Somewhat of an aside, fund ops seems to generally get steamrolled on these types of projects. My fund ops team members have raised several valid issues - are our other mutual funds going to directly invest in the mmf, or will they just invest in a single omnibus account? They never seem to get answered, and impact the amount of work fund ops need to do, though I'm sure the date won't change.
My big lesson learned today was, don't cave on the things you know the best. I was pressured to sign up to a date of May 1, and I should have made the case that, given our limited understanding of how much work needs to be done, let's pad a bit. We have a project that is going through its 3rd schedule delay in 9 months, and everyone on the steering team knows about. What an easy case to make for padding the date! I wimped out. Honestly, it was like the 3rd email I had exchanged with my sponsor, and I just didn't feel like exchanging another email. Lame excuse. Anyway, I'm going to start standing up to these people.
Next step, lessons learned. One of the big reasons I'm on the case is the last product launch went particularly badly. So I'm going to dig up the dirt on what has gone poorly in the past so I can avoid those mistakes.
That's it for now - I'll try to keep this up for future reference.
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