Société Générale is one of the leading French banks and one of the oldest, founded in 1864. It offers a full range of financial services, from retail banking to investment services and asset management.
The Architecture, Security & Transformation division sits at the heart of Société Générale’s Client Relations and Infrastructure Services. Its mission is to facilitate the transformation of business applications by managing projects with a high level of complexity in an international environment.
To strengthen the Global Technology Services unit and its partner IT departments, Société Générale engaged a Project Director/PMO from Synapsys with strong expertise in leading complex initiatives to serve as Technical Project Manager.
Rigor, autonomy, curiosity, and adaptability were key qualities required to meet the expectations of this assignment.
The Technical Project Manager’s first assignment was to monitor and resolve five application issues identified as obstacles to integrating cloud applications into Société Générale’s platform.
“Given the complexity of Société Générale’s ecosystem, the first mission was mainly focused on understanding the organization, becoming familiar with the core tools and processes, and setting up my own organizational system (mind maps, stakeholder register, to-do list, document structure, glossaries, time tracking, etc.)”
Technical Project Manager
Subsequently, the Technical Project Manager was responsible for evolving the Kubernetes CI/CD platform to enhance its performance and stability in order to support the rapid growth in activity.
Within ten days, the first steering committee was organized to align the visions of both major stakeholders, the client and the service provider, enabling constructive collaboration.
This first committee was a success, launching six key workstreams covering areas such as performance, resilience, and a new billing model.
In parallel, the Technical Project Manager also worked on refreshing an authentication and authorization solution, including cost assessments for different evolution scenarios, and on managing the remediation of RH5/6 and W2K8/12 obsolescence across the Middleware perimeter of the department.
Since January 2023, the Technical Project Manager has been overseeing the global management of a project to migrate two datacenters. The goal is to prepare and execute the transition of all legacy assets to the new network, migrate storage to address obsolescence, and contribute to cost-saving initiatives by aligning with the datacenter re-urbanization strategy while considering numerous business constraints.
In parallel, the 2024 budget preparation (Workload, OPEX, CAPEX) and coordination with business units are underway to plan the migration roadmap for 2024.
The Technical Project Manager works with four project leads (storage, network, middleware, and datacenter) who manage the preparation and execution of different migration waves, coordinating around fifty technical and functional stakeholders and about eighty business contacts.
In addition, they contributed to corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives by implementing an eco-design approach to ensure sustainable solutions “by design” throughout the project lifecycle.
Regular previews are organized to present upcoming projects to department heads within the Retail Client Relationship entity—highlighting initiatives that may impact them in the short or medium term and sharing feedback on selected solutions.