Individual Assignment: Interview

Wing Yee LEE 70384987

Master of Health Leadership and Policy, University of British Columbia

APPP501-101: Project Management and Leadership

Stephanie Arbuckle, HBComm, MA, PMP

Interviewee: Stanley, LAW

March 28, 2022

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 Interview

This assignment is intended to help you think about the field of project management,

from the perspective of a project manager and/or a person who hires them. You need to

find someone to interview. A list of ‘conversation starters’ will be provided but your

intention should be to express your own curiosity on topics relevant to this course, and to

your interviewee’s career, to glean as many learnings for yourself as possible.

All submissions will be done via Canvas and include your name and your interviewee’s

on the first page.

This assignment will be evaluated based on the depth of the conversation shown in your

report, and the relevance to the field of project management as well as to your own

career path. You can capture this by paraphrasing what was discussed. Your use of

language for clarity and conciseness is also important.

Please use Arial 11, with 1.5 spacing, for a length of 3 to 6 pages.

If you cannot find someone to interview, please contact the TA as we may have some

contacts for you.

Feel free to use as many or as few of these as you like! Your goals are to have an

interesting conversation, get to know this person a little bit, and learn something about

the field of project management.

Other tips:

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  I recommend you google the person and look them up on LinkedIn before

talking with them. You can assume that they will assume that you have done

this, as with most new contacts these days!

 Keep in mind each interviewee will get 2-3 calls from our class, so do NOT

read these out loud exactly or it won’t feel like a conversation!

 As with ‘informational interviews’ seriously UNDERplay any networking

benefit, make no requests, and be scrupulous about scheduling. Same time

of course accepting all offers of assistance!

Questions about the person you are meeting:

 What is your background, how did you get to this point in your career?

 Were you or are you considered to be a Project Manager?

 Do you hire project managers? If so, what do you look for? Avoid?

 What are you looking forward to next in your career?

 What’s the biggest challenge in your career right now?

 What are the ‘forks in the road’ if you look back, and which forks are you

happy you took, and are there any you wonder about . . . (this is a bit

personal so you’ll have to judge if it could work into your conversation or not!)

Questions about their views on project management:

 Did you ever have a project go really badly? That you were running or

someone near you was? What do you think happened?

 What’s the biggest challenge on the projects you deal with right now?

 What are the best project managers like?

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  What’s the best project you’ve ever been involved with and why?

Questions about careers:

 How do people get started in your field? (if their field is of interest to you)

 How do people transfer across into your field from others? (again, if of

interest to you)

 How are the most effective people you know managing their careers during

Covid, or maybe not too affected?

 Go for a personally useful question here if you think the person could be

helpful to you, about where you are now and where you’d like to go next.

Other:

 How do you handle it when team members are on a lot of projects and it’s

hard to get their attention for yours?

 Look at some of our teachback topics, likely you can pull a few questions

from those (challenging sponsors, eliciting requirements, team forming,

overworked teams)

 Look at our course outline, feel free to ask questions to help you weigh which

aspects of this course you want to remember most, that will be most useful to

you going forward!

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Stanley Law is currently the Head of Product and Digital in HSBC Broking Services

(Asia) Limited (“HSBC Broking”). He drives business growth and supports the business

proposition by delivering holistic investment product solutions and managing digital

modernization initiatives. Stanley is a seasoned project manager in banking and

investment business with over 14 years of experience in multiple local and regional

financial institutions including DBS Bank (Hong Kong) Limited, China CITIC Bank

(International) Limited and Bank of China (Hong Kong) Limited. Before his time with

HSBC Broking, he was the Head of Cash Equities in DBS Bank in 2018-2019 and be the

Assistant General Manager of Investment Services in China CITIC Bank in 2015-2018.

Stanley graduated from The University of Hong Kong with a degree in Economics and

Finance and first started his career in HSBC Hong Kong as a Management Trainee in

Retail Banking and Wealth Management business. Stanley shared that what enabled

him to be a successful candidate of the HSBC Graduate Program was not simply by his

degree from the university, instead he took a gap year from his Bachelor program and

worked as a Co-op student trainee in HSBC and as an Intern analyst in Morgan Stanley

which prepared him with the hands-on experience and relevant profile to start his career

as a manager in the banking business. Stanley mentioned that it is not necessary to

have business or finance degree to start a career in the financial industry, and he has

colleagues coming from different disciplines including literature, geography, science, and

social science. Stanley believes what make a successful manager or executive in

banking, or possibly most roles in business, are skills in problem solving, prioritization

and organization, presentation, and more importantly communication and working with

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others as a team.

There were numbers of successful projects managed by Stanley in the recent years.

Stanley introduced the first-in-market instant remote account opening for banking and

investment service in China CITIC Bank. This was not only a technology or system

project by building a new mobile app, but a front-to-back project which changed

customer experience and operation model, and involved consideration of risks, control

and regulations which engagement with risk stewards and regulators are required.

Stanley encountered challenge that project sponsor or senior management were looking

for an aggressive timeline to become the first-in-market and an evolving scope to cover

as many products and services as possible. As the wish from management somehow

conflicted with project resources and timeline, Stanley found it is essential to manage the

expectation of stakeholders and to define the scope and the boundary of the project well.

In addition to Project Steering Committee meeting, Stanley kept key stakeholders

informed with the project status by providing timely update with a RAG status at a glance

and setting regular meetings to present a clear and accurate picture with challenge and

dependency highlighted. To avoid changing or expanding requirements affect project

launch and manage disappointment to stakeholders, Stanley managed the project by

defining a Minimal Viable Product (“MVP”) for day 1 launch with agreement from sponsor

and users, and at the same time gathering all the wished requirements from

stakeholders to come up with a wish list with prioritization for addressing in later phases

of the project. The MVP approach set a clear common goal for all members of the team

and allowed Stanley to launch the project on time within the planned resources and

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timeline.

In Stanley’s current role as the Head of Product and Digital in HSBC, Stanley

encountered challenges in securing the resources in terms of technology budget and

manpower to support the transformation projects to enhance the digital platform for

broking business. As HSBC is a global financial institution with multiple lines of business

around the world, it is always highly competitive for business and project team to secure

the annual IT resources every year. Before Stanley joined the Broking business in

HSBC, there was no major upgrade to its online platform for more than 10 years as the

former team was unable to get their budget request prioritized. Stanley found the

business cannot afford to grow by running on its legacy system, as it was built on a very

old technology with a browser-based Web front-end to customers without the availability

of mobile access. Instead of following the predecessor’s approach to raise the resources

request by saying what is needed, Stanley prepared a detailed analysis with a “what-if”

approach to study the cost and impact of running the business on its legacy platform.

Stanley illustrated to senior management that operating a legacy system would be costly

as it involves huge cost on system maintenance and evergreening, and there is cost

effective vendor solution in the market with new technology such as cloud computing

which allows the busines to have a new digital platform with multiple channels

capabilities at by making an one-off investment of similar or even less amount as

compare to the evergreening the legacy system. The proposal from Stanley detailed a

win-win solution to facilitate a sustainable business growth, enhance customer

experience and to mitigate technology risk for the company, and finally secured the buy-

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in from the senior management for an investment to the Broking business’ project for

revamping its digital trading platform. Stanley shared that it is essential to have a strong

business case to justify a project with a clear objective to engage senior management in

a highly competitive organization or business world.

To wrap up Stanley’s experience in the business, Stanley highlighted three key elements

which enable the success of project management.

 Data driven – Business proposal and decision-making process should be driven

by data or numbers. This allows management to make informed decision and to

foresee or understand what may or may not happen for any parameter changes

in a project. The uses of data are getting more important nowadays with the

evolving technology and the availability of big data, for instance, customer

satisfaction is no longer limited to qualitative feedback but also available in the

form of system footprints, respond and drop-off rate. This should be embedded in

every part of a project life cycle from initiation and planning to evaluation and

project closure.

 Stakeholder engagement – One should understand who the key stakeholders

of a project are and to proactively manage and engage every one of them, be it

they have an official or unofficial role in the project or not. This is closely related

to the management of scope, resources and requirements of the project as the

influence or input from stakeholders is likely to affect the output and timeline and

thus the success of the project. It is essential to keep every stakeholder engaged

and informed through formal meetings like Project Steering Committee and

informal dialogue or update like casual catch-up and regular project updates to

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 ensure nobody would be surprised any changes, deliverables and issues.

 Commercialization and communication – The success of a project is never

just an one-off service or product launch or a system release, what could make a

good product, service or system fails could be on its transition or how it is

communicated to internal or external clients. Therefore it is critical to manage the

transition or any changes well, such as providing early notification to the clients

or users, offering training and support resources like guidebook or FAQs, and

creating incentive to encourage respond or take up. A detailed communication

plan which goes hand in hand with a project plan would lead the project to a path

for success.