In November 2006 Bank of America acquired US Trust; this was with the aspirations that Bank of America would get a stronger foothold to enhance their Private Banking portfolio, which serviced the ultra-wealthy. A part of this acquisition was to bring all of US Trust’s proprietary computer systems that manage client’s investments and trust account data into TrustWeb, which was Bank of America’s proprietary database. Bank of America had just made the decision to utilize TrustWeb because they had just made significant investments. They also considered the contracts and number of employees it would affect in the TrustWeb system, so they decided that they could merge two existing US Trust systems (PMW+ and AMS) into their own. However, TrustWeb
By not finding the PM first he was working from a disadvantage by not being able to facilitate the definition and planning phases of the project. This responsibility would have fallen directly on the TLT Santos because the PM directly reported to him. The next issue was the PM’s lack of knowledge in IT, coupled with being a newer PM and having such a high worth project needed full attention. He was also unaware of the complexity of the system that US Trust utilized, it was user-friendly, but it pulled data from several databases, which were being upgraded simultaneously. The aforementioned issues would have been the PM’s responsibilities to understand the importance of this particular project; he was brought in after he had an opportunity to select his own team that had the necessary expertise. In the future if a project is going to be a success there needs to be an identification of who the PM will be from the first day of planning. It is my opinion that this this where this project first fell down. There also seemed to be a lack of direction from the sponsor, Robert Sandberg, who would have been ultimately responsible for the success or failure of this project. There was a definitive lack of IT knowledge by the PM in this case; I would have brought in someone with the breadth of knowledge that had IT expertise in databases. Also, as stated in the case study Bank of America typically utilized the systems that worked