Case
study
Fidelity Investments is one of the
world’s largest providers of financial services. The firm is a provider of
investment management, retirement planning, portfolio guidance, brokerage,
benefits outsourcing and many other financial products and services to several million
individuals and institutions, as well as through several thousand financial
intermediary firms.
The Options Clearing Corporation
(OCC) proposed a new symbology use for options securities that will have a
broad impact on the financial industry and other financial applications,
subsystems and interfaces throughout the marketplace.
Portfolio Advisory Services (PAS), a
Fidelity Investment Brokerage managed accounts services offers professional
money management and research through model portfolios of mutual funds, was
asked to review and update their system programs calling a common I/O Module.
This module uses the 5 character CUSIP (Committee on Uniform Securities
Identification Procedures) number and planned to lengthen to a 22 byte CUSIP.
Also, run-time performance for the PAS application must be consistent or
improved throughout the nightly cycle.
The PAS group had two immediate
problems. They needed to find an IT Analyst with Fidelity Brokerage and if possible
PAS experience to analyze their system--programs, nightly jobs, procedures
(proc’s), and files that may use the common I/O module that is being updated to
include the 22 byte CUSIP.
The second is the IT Analyst will
have little to no assistance and needed to provide and install the solution
within a few months. He/She will need to attend all meetings, work with
Stakeholders, SME’s and QA to document and install the process within a timely
matter.
They asked Dan Singleton to take on
the project. Initial finding was FBSI PAS was not directly affected by options
symbol project. Though, FBSI PAS needed to update several batch programs and procedures
to replace the common I/O module to retrieve pricing. Also they need to remove
all references to a VSAM file from programs, JCL and proc’s and add a few
read-only DB2 tables. Data on DB2 needed to match data written to batch reports
for PAS Stakeholders.
Reporting to a Project Manager, Dan
took the role of Business/Systems Analyst. He meet with the Fidelity’s team on
the company wide initiative representing PAS. He also communicated with the PAS
stakeholders and SME’s to develop and integrate a business and system plan.
Using the Financial Services Data
Model (FSDM), he outlined step by step the technical framework, development package,
unit test plan, system’s design and acquire the necessary approvers. Documents
completed were a SDS and TSD. These documents were stored to the Fidelity
Sharepoint repository. These documents became a model to current and future
system technical documents for PAS projects.
Dan wrote and presented a Technical
Design Review that included business objective, functional description,
illustrations, technical design, environmental and system impact, and testing
approach. Dan also worked with and review QA and Business plans for SIT and
BAT.
The stakeholders were very pleased
with the outcome. The system installed prior to Fidelity’s company wide
cutover. The Stakeholders CICS screens and batch reports reading the DB2 tables
contained pricing information were verified. Run time for nightly batch slightly
improved. Documentation has been used for new hires for the PAS system and
Business groups.
