Principle #3 Deal with Doubters

The CLS Group, a foreign exchange service based in London and one of Swift's bigger customers, was one of the participants in a SwiftNet pilot.

As the day approached to launch the pilot, CLS executives were getting nervous. Testing of SwiftNet had produced the inevitable bugs and glitches, and CLS began to second-guess whether the network would be as reliable as Eng had promised. They weren't even sure who exactly was responsible for setting up interfaces between CLS's platform and SwiftNet - Swift or CLS's operating systems vendor, IBM.

CLS executives wanted to clarify responsibilities for the project, so they asked Eng to meet with them and IBM. "There would have been no second chance if it could not be shown that the end-to-end system worked effectively," says Rob Close, group CEO at CLS (he was then the chief operating officer).

To prepare for the meeting, Eng asked the project manager and technical director to find out whatever they could about how IBM viewed its role in the project. He also made himself aware of the source of the confusion (a disagreement about what was causing the problems during testing - IBM's application or SwiftNet's difficulties interfacing with IBM). "I didn't want to be surprised, and I wanted to be honest and stick to the facts," Eng says. After numerous meetings, Eng clarified Swift's and IBM's responsibilities for the deployment.

CLS executives were satisfied. "Joe showed a sense of pragmatism and goodwill to find the way forward in what otherwise could have been a difficult circumstance," Close says.

Principle #4 Not Everything Is Negotiable

Finally, in the northern summer of 2003, SwiftNet was ready to roll out, and Eng came face to face with an expectation from customers that was nonnegotiable. He had to meet the deadline for deployment.

Eng had wanted to recapture the time he lost earlier in the year, when he was sidetracked by the network management glitches, as well as build in time to deal with complications. To compensate, he wanted to move the completion date for the roll-out from December 2004 to mid-2005. He was concerned that Swift's largest users would need 18 months to migrate to the new system. Banks had to follow a complicated process to migrate to SwiftNet that included deploying a pilot before they would be ready for full operation.

But slowing down the roll-out wasn't an option, according to Y B Yeung, head of information technology in the Asia-Pacific region for Hong Kong & Shanghai Banking and a member of Swift's board of directors. "Any delay would be a sign that Swift was not meeting customer demand," says Yeung, who chairs the board's technology and policy committee. Galante adds, "Holidays, planning for disaster recovery, regular system upgrades took time. If anything, we wanted to go faster." Eng went back to his staff with the message that the deadline was not moving.

Within two months, Eng presented a new deployment plan that both met the deadline and addressed his concerns that banks have enough time to get the migration right.

Eng's original plan was to assign countries to "windows", in which Swift's smaller customers in each country or region had a set time to migrate to SwiftNet. Large customers had their own migration schedules. To make up for lost time, Eng devoted additional resources to quality assurance before the migration began. In addition, his staff found ways to add the large customers to each country window or overlap the beginning and end of each window so that more banks were migrating at a time. To simplify the process for ordering services, Eng's team created an online application for customers to place their orders.

The migration was completed on time, with no notable problems, according to Yeung. Yeung gives Eng high marks for his responsiveness to customers. "He says: 'I hear what you are saying,' and then he goes back and sees if there are ways to meet your needs. That way he [is] innovative in identifying solutions."

In other words, Eng and the IT department succeeded and earned credibility by effectively managing stakeholder expectations.