On October 28, 2003 the Cheque Clearing for the 21st Century act (aka Cheque 21) was passed by the Canadian government opening the door to electronically transmit checks without having to send the original paper version.  Canada’s largest payments, statement solutions and cheque clearance provider was mandated to enable the capture and digitization of cheques.  A project to achieve the above and also ensure transmission of digital cheque images was initiated as it also represented a huge opportunity to increase accuracy and diminish the dependency and effort associated with physically couriering over 8 million cheques all over the nation each night.  By the middle of 2006, the banks were becoming increasingly concerned about progress and the deadlines provided by the Canadian Payments Association.  At this juncture, we were engaged to run the planning and delivery of the Truncation Electronic Cheque Presentment (TECP) project.  

 Phase I – Assessment of Projects In Flight 
Our first priority was to identify the scope of work underway and understanding what was impeding progress:

• We identified that there were 86 concurrent projects were in progress
• We identified dependencies within the projects as well as inter-project dependencies
• We developed and published an integrated Program Plan comprised of the 86 projects with dependencies
• We implemented enterprise standards and reporting amongst 50 project managers representing over 500 resources
• We implemented regular internal and external status meetings 
• We set up a full Project Management Office

 Phase II – Reporting to Banks 
Once the above was in place, we continued to update the integrated program plan – a 25,000 line project plan with all projects and dependencies integrated into it — and published it to the banks on a monthly basis.  As part of this we designed and launched a program portal which allowed each bank representative to only access materials relevant to their institution, thus ensuring the privacy and security of all bank projects and materials.    

 Phase III – Delivery & Representation 
In conducting the above, we succeeded in alleviating the concerns of the banking industry and eventually were asked to represent the banks at the Canadian Payments Association.  One of our final achievements was running the final government mandated tests to demonstrate cheque imaging was indeed working successfully and that reconciliation across all banks was working properly.  These were historic milestones for the Canadian banking industry.