Direct FCU’s Conversion Pushes Forward Remotely Amid COVID-19

Editor’s note: Direct Federal Credit Union is a one-branch, $750 million credit union located in Needham, Mass. It is undergoing its first core conversion since 1984 and has partnered with CU Times to document its journey until the new core is anticipated go live in 2021. Contributing authors will be members of the project team and each article will tell a story from a different point of view. Read its previous three articles and continue to follow along at cutimes.com/instantinsights.

It has been a little over three months since we kicked off our core conversion project from Fiserv Spectrum to Corelation Keystone. As most of you are also experiencing, life at the credit union has been a bit interesting due to COVID-19. We are operating with most of our employees remote, many of whom have never worked remotely before. I am proud to say we are hitting project milestones, meeting as a team and with our vendors regularly, and have been able to keep our project on track through this entire pandemic.

We anticipate our new core will go live on Feb. 1, 2021. To facilitate the conversion, Corelation has provided a dedicated project manager as well as a team of analysts. Each one of these analysts has a single focus during the conversion, whether it be reports, forms, cards or interfaces, and the project manager looks at the conversion holistically and ensures we hit key milestones.

Right after our kick-off in February, we completed a questionnaire for Corelation regarding our various programs, products and services. We reviewed that document with its conversion analyst to give them an understanding of our current state. Corelation then began to show us how to set up our products and fees in their future state within Keystone. These sessions were initially scheduled for a three-day onsite review but had to be changed to five days’ worth of virtual work sessions via WebEx due to COVID-19. We limited each day to four hours to maintain engagement from the project team. While WebEx is a great tool for bringing remote teams together, it does get tiring, as it involves a lot of staring at screens and trying not to speak over each other. We found four hours was just about the most the team could handle each day.

In March we completed Training Discovery, a week-long session of questions, answers and a high-level overview of Corelation’s core by its training analyst. We were shown how to use Keystone in all the areas that were different from our current core. The most significant change taking place is we are moving from an account-centric platform to a person-centric one, which, among many things, will allow us to present more personalized offers to our members.

Since March, we’ve also had remote kick-off meetings with our forms, interfaces and accounting analysts. We also have our Conversion Action Teams (CATs) working on data cleanup in anticipation of our first data cut in early June.

While we are still early in the overall project, there are a lot of moving pieces happening at once, all of which need to be reviewed by various teams, departments and vendors before any final decision can be made. Coordinating these moving parts are Direct’s internal Project Management Office (PMO); externally, Kenneth J. Soles & Associates (KJS); and as mentioned above, Corelation’s project manager.

We rely on KJS, our external core consultant, to be the traffic cop that instructs Direct as to which tasks we are responsible for and by what date. As we progress through the project plan and begin to integrate other third-party applications, including a new digital banking platform, the role of KJS consultants will be essential. They will write the appropriate project plan for each vendor or communicate with the vendor’s project manager if one is assigned.

Our internal director of PMO attends each of the project meetings (typically 10 to 15 a week), takes notes and reviews outstanding tasks with all internal stakeholders. She tracks the deliverables for each of our internal CATs and is the primary contact with KJS.

Communication is vital, and we are trying hard not to work in silos. While each CAT has their weekly meeting to review their specific tasks, KJS also runs a weekly meeting where each CAT provides an update on their team’s status. Additionally, we have a weekly meeting led by Corelation that all internal team members attend, as well as KJS. Holding these two meetings may seem redundant, and some of it is, but having the two sessions is vital to keeping the meetings relevant to their attendees and ensuring all tasks are discussed.

So, as the overall project owner, what have I learned in the first three months of this project?

• Putting the work in up front makes things easier. Know your data and make sure you have excellent project management and communication processes in place.
• Be open to change and trust your vendors. You hired them for a reason, and they know the product better than you do. Just because a process worked in your old core doesn’t mean there isn’t a better process to follow in the new one. The number of changes our vendor has suggested that we are adopting have been significant.
• Even during the bleakest times, something good will come your way. In our case, we were looking to hire a new core administrator to own our core after we go live. On the day Direct decided to have a remote workforce due to COVID-19, we received a resume from someone looking to move to Massachusetts who has years of credit union experience and has been through a Corelation Keystone conversion previously. Jackpot!

Brian Medeiros is Chief Information Officer for Direct FCU in Needham, Mass. He can be reached at 781-433-2900 or bmedeiros@direct.com.