Finding the real solution, not fixing one broken document

After beginning my new role, the first problem I sought to address was our disorganized and inconsistent Weekly Pipeline report. This single PDF guided our Weekly Pipeline Call, which was meant to give 90 bankers across the country shared visibility into everything that was in the pipeline across the department, from client RFPs to client meetings & pitches. It failed miserably.

The document itself wasn’t the biggest problem, though; the data beneath it was. It was manually compiled in Excel by a new junior banker each week who individually emailed every (already stressed!) team for updates on Monday mornings. As a result, the data was rarely current, full of duplicate and incorrect items, and the PDF file had to be manually reformatted every single week.

The entire process to create this document that wasn't even legible in its final form took 3 hours of time that could've been better spent on client-facing work.

Why it mattered:

Unreliable pipeline data and reports meant leaders were steering a 90-person department on information nobody trusted. Not to mention that because the department spanned every region and sector, reusable client pitches and ideas were invisible to the teams who could have leveraged them.

Approaching the build thoughtfully

Designing for everyone the process touched

I interviewed across every level - junior and senior bankers, regional heads, compliance, and the department head. Each stakeholder group used the pipeline differently, and a tool that ignored any one of them would be abandoned. I turned those conversations into process diagrams and a requirements list to make sure I didn't leave out anything that could be addressed through the build process.

Choosing the pragmatic tool, not the prestigious one

With effectively no budget, I audited what we already had licensed and chose Microsoft Access. It was certainly not the most high-tech option, but the right one on cost, customization, deployability, and ease of maintenance. I scoped it into a four-phase roadmap to de-risk the build and show value early, then presented the plan to the department head for buy-in and approval.

Building the system and organizing the rollout

I designed and coded both the front and back ends of the database system, teaching myself SQL and VBA through forums as I went. The system was tastefully designed with automated email generation, one-click report generation, full search capabilities, and automated compliance checks. I tested with a small group of bankers before the department-wide launch, then built training materials, ran live demos, and stayed on as steward of data integrity, since bad data was what killed the old system in the first place.

Balancing tradeoffs

There were some key decisions I made that required tradeoffs:

• Leveraged Microsoft Access instead of coding something from scratch. In a perfect world, we would have been able to hire a developer to help us build a fully custom enterprise software. The reality was that not only did we not have the budget, but our organization was very strict on security. Getting those approvals would have taken months that we just didn't have. In leveraging the custom capabilities within Microsoft Access, I knew it wouldn’t necessarily scale forever, but it was free, ready to use right away, and something the team could keep running without an engineer until we got the budget and resources to build something more substantial.

• Built it on my own. That meant everything depended on me, but it was the only realistic option since we had no one else with an applicable skillset or interest that could help (remember, we're talking about finance-minded bankers here ☺︎). On the positive side, doing everything myself with oversight from key stakeholder groups kept the whole thing consistent.

• Rolled it out in phases instead of all at once. People waited longer for the full tool, but the phased approach help me build trust early and let me fix and iterate things based on how people actually used it.

Realizing real outcomes