Merger Integration At Bank Of America The Trust Web Project Case Solution

1. How Did Morris Get Himself into Trouble On This Project?

The integration process of US trust with Bank of America was consist of several sub-projects and Mike Morris was given the charge of running the Trust Web Project. His major responsibilities include supervising the processes, the schedule, the stakeholders involved in the project and overseeing the approved budget. He had recently joined the transition execution team and assessment and careful review of status quo have allowed him to understand the probability of deeper issues to come. 

Firstly, being an extensive and extremely complicated project there are several stakeholders were involved which belongs to multiple areas ranging from within the bank, from US Trust organization, from client service management team and the transition leadership team, from information technology team and back office operations team. There is evident to suggest that there is a clear gap of definite hierarchy which has created many issues. It is mentioned in the case that these stakeholders do not report direct to Mike Morris which are the reason why he is powerless in the whole process and cannot execute any direct necessary steps. This lack of authority is the reason why Morris has to portray himself as an honest broker to get them to carry on with the project. 

The project is not on track because apparently there is a lack of consensus between the project executions team and the leaders at US Trust. In the project kick-off meeting, Morris and his team listened to the concerns of US Trust individuals about the deficiencies in US Trust in terms of reporting, cash receipt generation and account maintenance. The requirement seems to be unclear as the project specifications cannot be agreed upon. This was because of the fact that the budget and time were already approved for this project and these enhancements were clearly overstepping the budget and time constraints. The participants of US Trust were more oriented towards the view that compromising the specific feature will help Morris to get the project on track but at the same time, it would enlarge the risk of degradation of service. Hence, the loss of existing and potential clientele would be vulnerable. 

Another thing that leads to derailing the project from the agreed scope was that Morris missed the Dallas meeting which was scheduled to evaluate the necessary steps needed to for the successful 2nd release of the project.