Case Study--IT Analyst

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.