Case Study: Bank of America

My BofA

Overview

Client

Bank of America

Industry

Consumer, Commercial, Investment Banking, Financial Services

Project

My BofA: Designing and developing a digital workspace including calendaring, communications (email, chat, TXT), task management, file management, human resources functionality.

Impact: Supporting 143,000+ employees globally

Contribution

Business Process Consulting, Software Product Management, UX/UI,
Software Development, Data Migration, System Design and Integration, Project Management

Case Study Navigation

Goals

After the success of Take Ownership — our previous project with BofA — they saw the value of highly focused work, well-designed tools, and easy accessibility to internal assets. Given that we had a strong, collaborative partnership, it seemed natural to pitch BofA on other ways to create additional focus and efficiencies.

Albeit a grandiose idea, we pitched a digital workspace for all of BofA’s employees — My BofA. Soup Group envisioned a workspace focused on giving everyone an easier, friendlier, and better place to work. The goal was to make their communications, tasks, and day-to-day activities more fluid by giving them the tools focused on their specific roles.

It clearly wasn’t a grandiose idea to BofA. Where’s the meme for “When someone agrees to pay for your big idea?”

Soup Group's Solution

A perfectly concise work portal for BofA employees

Soup Group built My BofA as a place to centralize all important, commonly used functions, and company resources while eliminating the typical desktop clutter of disjointed communication, tasks, and documents. Every employee had immediate access to precisely what they needed, when they needed it.

My BofA included all internal communication, task management, calendaring, and a comprehensive document management system that allowed employees to create, review, collaborate, and approve documents.

Process Consulting

Maximize the “flow” in workflow​

In our discovery process with department heads and stakeholders, we were able to clearly define the digital workspace and functions for all employee types. This was as much about corroborating our initial ideas as discovering new process requirements for BofA.

The goal of our analysis, specifications, and design was to create the most concise process for every use case. Working with BofA department directors, we refined how their employees worked. This was accomplished in large part by improving existing workflows while eliminating redundant and unnecessary tasks  — subtractive thinking.

Security

Guarantee secure access, globally

During our previous work on BofA’s Take Ownership, we created a security architecture that integrated with BofA’s existing systems and network topography. We designed the architecture to allow authentication between the My BofA website and the existing BofA internal security systems.

Security is the priority for financial institutions, and Soup Group used industry best practices and security standards to guarantee flexible access and complete data security. Additionally, we provided and managed third-party security auditing teams to test the systems as they were designed and developed.  

LEVERAGing existing technology

And making it better

We leveraged their approved technology to work seamlessly with My BofA. Additionally, we refined or added to their systems as needed. By working with BofA’s existing technologies, the approval processes were quick and efficient, and the project delivery was on time and on budget. 

Soup Group also worked closely with BofA’s information technology teams to plan for security mandates, system design, and topographical changes. Systems integration and migration were also collaborative since we performed them at the BofA facilities.

Internal Communication

Direct messaging and email

To meet the project’s needs, SGC built an API to their Exchange Server that allowed back-and-forth communications including the ability to search locally. Through fast and thorough searches, messaging, and email communications were more efficient, which led to more timely communication. 

My BofA used a standard browser-based user interface, eliminating the need to install and maintain various email and messaging applications. Additionally, users communicated within the familiar My BofA interface without opening and maintaining other applications.  

We also tied messaging to the multiple contact management systems to further increase efficiencies.

Document Management

Collaborate, review, edit, and manage revisions — all in one place

Soup Group created a customized document management system using the newly designed workflows. BofA benefited from the time savings, increased quality of communications, accountability tracking, and precise record keeping that we built into the system.  

To enhance the system’s functionality and document management capabilities, we used AI to collect metadata through the document’s creation, collaboration, editing, and review process. The metadata facilitated document connections to the My BofA users’ task management, file storage, and search indexing systems. 

Results and Nuance

Ramp up

The adoption rate of My BofA was rapid and hassle-free. Within six weeks, while using a staged rollout, all 90,000+ employees (at time of launch) were using it effectively.

My BofA’s rapid adoption was largely due to the user interface that was designed for each employee’s specific functions. Interestingly, this created a viral word-of-mouth among employees, promoting My BofA’s efficiencies and ease of use, which was a large part of its successful adoption.

Adoption Rate

My BofA Adoption Rate

Make I.T.'s lives better

By focusing on reliability, reduced maintenance, decreased software costs, and fewer support requests, Soup Group positively affected the IT department and, in turn, BofA.

Maintenance time and cost went down because of My BofA’s automated maintenance systems, and the reduction of applications per employee.

The new system required fewer installed applications which greatly reduced desktop maintenance requirements. Software costs were also significantly reduced due to My BofA’s license-free browser-based system. As a result, desktop support requests slowed to a trickle since there was only one browsed-based application to manage.

IT ROI

My BofA IT ROI

Customizable Dashboards

Making their workspace perfectly pertinent was essential to the adoption and success of My BofA. As a default, access to documents, data, and functionality were predefined based on an employee’s role and requirements.  

Beyond My BofA’s default settings, everyone could personalize their workspace. Along with customizable document and data access, we provided predefined widgets, functions, and accommodated external newsfeeds that employees could include and arrange as desired.

Customizable Dashboards

I didn’t know how much I liked my fellow employees

BofA knew they needed more instant communication, but no one could have guessed what the overall effect of the new Chat tool would be. As a business tool, it was a huge success, but the amount of usage and positive social impact went far beyond our original estimations.

Employees adopted Chat as their primary form of communication, which greatly increased efficiency, but the growth of community and camaraderie it stimulated was a total surprise. Unexpectedly and unintentionally, it brought the company closer together.

Happy BofA Employees
"Better" Begins with Dialogue
/ enhance, enrich, rework, help, improve, perfect, refine, upgrade, correct, emend, rectify, fine-tune, revamp /

If you would prefer to use your own email or call:
info@soupgroupconsulting.com | (415) 843-9925

Soup Group: Create a Dialogue
Soup Group: Create a Dialogue