Case study · Project & process management
Critical infrastructure protected in 90 days.Change governance rebuilt from the ground up.
90-day wartime cloud migration. €7M savings. Change processing: 5 days → 1 day.
Overview
Raiffeisen Bank
Five years at Raiffeisen Bank covered two distinct challenges — one driven by operational chaos, one by war. Both required the same discipline: clear process, measurable outcomes, no tolerance for ambiguity when the stakes were high.
Story 1 — Challenge
90 days. Full-scale invasion. Client data and client money protected.
Project management · Critical infrastructure
On 24 February 2022, Russia launched a full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Raiffeisen Bank’s critical infrastructure — serving hundreds of thousands of retail and business clients — remained on-premises in a country now under active attack.
The risk was not theoretical. Physical infrastructure in a war zone is a single point of failure. The bank had no viable contingency for prolonged disruption to on-premises systems.
The mandate: migrate critical infrastructure to cloud in 90 days, without service interruption, without data loss, with full regulatory compliance maintained throughout.
Approach
What was done, and how.
I led the programme as project manager and SteerCo chair — coordinating infrastructure, security, compliance, and operations teams across a migration that could not afford to fail.
Zero-downtime migration architecture — parallel environments maintained throughout, cutover planned to the hour.
Daily cross-functional standups replacing fortnightly steering — decision latency reduced from 14 days to same-day.
Risk register updated in real time — every infrastructure dependency mapped before migration, not discovered after.
Regulatory reporting maintained without interruption throughout the transition period.
Results
What changed.
- 90 days
- Full critical infrastructure migrated to cloud
- €7M
- Operational cost savings — achieved through migration, vendor consolidation and decommissioning of on-premises infrastructure
- 99.9%
- System uptime maintained throughout 2022–23, including the active wartime period
- 0
- Client data incidents during migration
- ✓
- Full regulatory compliance maintained
Story 2 — Challenge
How a fragmented change process became a one-day operation — with full audit trail and fewer incidents.
Process optimisation · Governance
Change requests arrived via email, phone calls and Service Desk tickets with no standard routing, no audit trail and no visibility of risk. Average resolution time: 5 days. For a bank running 15+ live transformation initiatives simultaneously, this was unacceptable.
The deeper problem: the existing Change Advisory Board (CAB) convened every stakeholder for every change — regardless of whether that stakeholder had any decision-making responsibility for the system in question. Reviews were slow, participation was unfocused, and accountability was diluted.
No one could answer: how many incidents last month were caused by changes? How much unplanned downtime did they create?
Approach
What was done, and how.
Step 1 — Map reality, not the process chart on the wall
Spent the first two weeks mapping how change requests actually flowed — not how the org chart said they should. Every handoff, every bottleneck, every step where requests stalled.
Step 2 — Design the platform and the governance model
Built a SQL-driven platform with three core capabilities.
Auto CAB
Minor changes with no assessed impact on other systems bypassed manual CAB entirely. Automated routing applied the standard, published the record, and moved on. No meeting required.
Dependency-based CAB
Changes affecting the availability of other systems triggered a CAB assembled from owners of those specific dependencies. If your system was not affected, you were not in the room. CAB size shrank. Preparation quality rose.
Statistics and reporting
Every change logged with outcome data: implemented without incident, rolled back, caused unplanned downtime. For the first time, the bank had a factual answer to “how many incidents this quarter were change-related?” — and a baseline to improve against.
Step 3 — Govern the rollout
Chaired SteerCo through implementation. Defined escalation paths and trained teams. Managed the cultural shift from “everyone approves everything” to accountable, evidence-based change governance.
Results
What changed.
- 5 → 1
- Days. Change request processing time
- ↓
- Reduction in change-related incidents
- ↓
- Unplanned business system downtime reduced
- 15+
- Transformation initiatives governed
- Auto CAB
- Minor low-risk changes approved without manual review — releasing senior time
- Targeted CAB
- Only affected system owners in the room — faster decisions, clearer accountability
- ✓
- Full audit trail: every change, every outcome, every dependency
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