Project Code: MXC-W061 DML to SLX Integration at JPMorgan Chase A Major Qualifying Project Report Submitted to the faculty of Worcester Polytechnic Institute In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Bachelor of Science Submitted By: _______________________ _______________________ Michael J. Kristan Megan R. Slonski Project Center: Wall St. New York, NY B Term 2006 Sponsoring Agency: JPMorgan Chase & Co. Submitted To: Project Advisors: ________________________ _________________________ Michael Ciaraldi Arthur Gerstenfeld On-Site Liaisons: Marisa Giliberti Danielle Rumore Brian Kenney Abstract This MQP aimed to assist JPMorgan Chase with the successful completion of the high priority DML to SLX Integration project. In the pre-design phase, work was carried out to map data fields between the two systems and to analyze the anticipated effect of this project on server performance. Concurrently, a thorough project plan was created to be used in a critical path analysis. Struggles in creating this led to the recommendation of a process for better managing projects. This document is not intended for public distribution. i Permission must be obtained from JPMorgan Chase & Co. to disclose this document. Authorship This Major Qualifying Project is a collaborative effort of both team members. In compiling research and writing this paper each of us dedicated a significant amount of time and effort. There was an overall equal contribution to the executive summary, introduction, and background section made by both team members. Megan Slonski was mainly responsible to the sections pertaining to the critical path analysis and project management process improvements. Michael Kristan was primarily responsible for the sections regarding capacity planning and data mapping. This document is not intended for public distribution. ii Permission must be obtained from JPMorgan Chase & Co. to disclose this document. Executive Summary As the 17th largest corporation in the United States, JPMorgan Chase & Co. provides a wide range of banking and financial services to customers worldwide. One such service is known as securities lending. Securities lending is the market practice whereby securities are temporarily transferred from a lender to a borrower. For the period of the loan, the lender is protected against default through receipt of collateral from the borrower. JPMorgan acts as the facilitator in this transaction by matching lenders to qualified borrowers. JPMorgan also invests the collateral received on the loan and splits the return on investment between all three parties. In order to maintain its outstanding reputation, JPMorgan Chase & Co. must utilize new technology, maximize efficiency of its internal processes, and continually improve the services provided to its clients. Understanding the importance of these key business strategies, JPMorgan executives decided that the software Securities Lending Xpress (SLX) should be the sole front-end trading platform used to initiate all securities lending loans globally. The reason for this decision is that SLX has checks built in that ensure compliance to audit and government regulations. Also SLX is built on the most up-to-date, flexible platform when compared to the other systems. This will allow future changes to be made more quickly and at a lower cost. In this vision the other systems, including International Securities Lending System / Dan McLune (DML), would only be used as loan maintenance systems and would cease to perform any loan initiation activity. The current state of the business requires that several incremental projects be completed in order to turn this vision into a reality. One such project is to integrate DML and SLX so that information pertaining to loan maintenance activity in DML is passed in the form This document is not intended for public distribution. iii Permission must be obtained from JPMorgan Chase & Co. to disclose this document. of a message to SLX throughout the day and overnight using a feedback loop. Only then can SLX use this information to accurately update lender limit and borrower credit line utilizations. The work done on this Major Qualifying Project (MQP) aimed to assist JPMorgan with the successful completion of this important project. Specifically, work was done to accomplish four main goals. The first two relate to pre-design activities that needed be completed prior to the design and build phases of the project. Success of the pre-design activities would contribute to the successful implementation of the feedback loop. The first goal of this MQP was to assist in mapping and matching the data fields between the two systems to ensure that SLX receives all of the information it needs from DML to properly update its database. The second goal was to analyze the anticipated effects of the feedback loop on servers and mainframes so that additional resources could be introduced and performance would not be compromised. The third goal of this MQP was to gather the information needed to conduct a critical path analysis that would examine ways to expedite the delivery of the project. From this a fourth goal was established, which was to recommend possible improvements to project management practices that could result in shorter project durations, fewer delays, and more accurate estimates of project cost and delivery dates for this and future projects. The objective of the data mapping exercise was to examine the fields that DML has defined in a loan snapshot and compare that to the data fields SLX needs to receive to properly update borrower credit and lender limit utilizations. One of the challenges was that the fields in DML do not directly map to the fields in SLX. Therefore, an in-depth analysis needed to be conducted to examine how the data fields from DML should be This document is not intended for public distribution. iv Permission must be obtained from JPMorgan Chase & Co. to disclose this document. manipulated so that they are in a useable format for SLX. As part of the data mapping exercises, sample loans were observed from the production environment. Unfortunately a problem occurred when taking the raw loan data from DML and inputting it into a Microsoft Access database that would allow it to be analyzed. This raw data is known as a loan master file. There were more loan records in the loan master file than Microsoft Access allowed to be imported at once. To get around this, a program was developed that would split the file into multiple, smaller files that could be imported into Microsoft Access one at a time. With this accomplished, the JPMorgan team could begin to analyze how DML fields would map to SLX fields. The second objective, capacity planning, was to carry out a comprehensive analysis on the SLX servers and to gather enough information to make infrastructure decisions moving forward. The primary deliverable was a document that gives the reader an understanding of the resources required to run SLX in a production environment and to analyze the impact that the DML feedback loop will have on the systems. Information was gathered from many sources and compiled together to form a complete picture of the resources that SLX depends on. One of the primary data sources was a feedback loop that was formerly created as part of a project to integrate SLX with the domestic counterpart to DML known as SLMU. The plan was to investigate the current performance of the SLX servers with the SLMU feedback loop in use. The next step was to compare the number of SLMU messages to the anticipated number of DML messages to predict the effect that the DML feedback loop would have on SLX server performance. The analysis showed that the anticipated volume of DML messages between 11AM and 1PM is so high that it will diminish the SLX server performance. The This document is not intended for public distribution. v Permission must be obtained from JPMorgan Chase & Co. to disclose this document. performance will be diminished to such an extent that SLX will not be able to process messages from DML in the time deemed acceptable by business executives. This will hinder the booking of new loans and the updating of lender and borrower utilizations which will result in lost opportunity for JPMorgan. The third objective of this MQP was to gather the information needed to conduct a critical path analysis that would examine ways to expedite the delivery of the DML to SLX Integration Project. This project was important because it was deemed a high priority within the firm. A number of steps needed to be completed to gather the information that was required to utilize the critical path method in the most effective way. The basis for this analysis would be a thorough and cohesive project plan, which was created as a product of this objective. Meetings were held with each member of the project team to determine all project tasks, time estimates for the completion of each task, and the network of task dependencies. Work was also done with the project delivery manager to compile a list of all resources that would contribute to the project and to determine the percentage of each resource’s time that would be allocated to this initiative. All of this information was then incorporated into the project plan to be used in the future management of the project. The difficulty experienced in compiling the information needed for a thorough project plan exposed the need for the fourth goal of this MQP, which was to recommend improvements to project management processes. The improvements were aimed at making the processes more efficient, streamlined, simple and/or error-proof. In order to make these improvements, a thorough investigation of project management practices was conducted surrounding the following activities: providing project cost and duration This document is not intended for public distribution. vi Permission must be obtained from JPMorgan Chase & Co.