Matt Rarden, CEO at Kirtland Credit Union ($1.1B, Albuquerque, NM) logged roughly 15 years with IBM before making the jump to a credit union career. That background is shaping how the Southwestern cooperative approaches project management.
Rarden took the helm at Kirtland in 2020 and quickly started thinking about how to add more discipline and structure to the credit union’s project management work. With multiple initiatives underway simultaneously, it wasn’t uncommon for different projects to overlap in terms of the people and resources needed.
“We were stepping over one another,” he says. “Committing one another’s resources when we didn’t know they were committed. All that normal uncontrolled chaos.”
The solution started with bringing on a certified project management officer in 2021 — a role that now oversees two staff-level project managers. Beyond simply hiring dedicated staffers, Rarden also worked to put in place new processes and procedures around how to propose, review, and approve projects.
That structure includes a tiering system to rank projects by effort, resources, cost, criteria for approval, and more.
Tier 1 projects, for example, might require little effort or cost and involve only one line of business. Tier 5, on the other hand, might include mandatory regulatory requirements, involve multiple lines of business or stakeholders, or be a major revenue driver.
There’s a cultural evolution that has to happen. It sounds and feels like a lot of red tape, but we’ll collapse under our own weight if we don’t do this. We were already seeing that happen, and it was going to get worse for us as we grow.
Regardless, the credit union approves projects individually and maps them to its overall strategy to understand how to execute different projects simultaneously to reduce resource overlap.
“There’s a cultural evolution that has to happen,” Rarden says. “It sounds and feels like a lot of red tape, but we’ll collapse under our own weight if we don’t do this. We were already seeing that happen, and it was going to get worse for us as we grow.”
Oversight And Management
Although Kirtland does use some project management software, it designed the bulk of its structure internally. Project management became a key competency at IBM during Rarden’s time there, and he worked with the credit union’s leadership team to define each tier, determine how to prioritize projects, outline documentation requirements, and more.
The resource-management piece, however, is a bit harder. And according to Rarden, the credit union is still working on that.
CU QUICK FACTS
KIRTLAND CREDIT UNION
HQ: Albuquerque, NM
ASSETS: $1.1B
MEMBERS: 50,839
BRANCHES: 8
EMPLOYEES: 196
NET WORTH: 12.1%
ROA: 0.38%
“You’ve got to have some centralization from each of the lines of business and the key project resource folks,” the CEO says. “Understanding who is going to participate because of their expertise or position, understanding vacation schedules, and layering all this together is a big part of it, as well.”
To tackle resource management, a project steering committee meets monthly to examine project charters and determine which tiers are the right fit. According to Rarden, these senior leaders are the ultimate decision-makers, although approvals can go all the way up to the board if a project is big enough.
The committee members understand what’s going on and what resources are available. Internally, leaders evangelize for their projects, but if the credit union can’t work on multiple projects, then the steering committee has decide what to prioritize.
The easiest considerations are those that relate to revenue and business lines. The harder part is prioritization. If the committee agrees on the merits of a particular project but can’t make it happen during the current fiscal year, it might table the project for the future.
“It’s still something in our purview and we’ve agreed it needs to happen, we just can’t raise it to the level of priority now,” Rarden says.
Although the credit union might kill some projects, few are ever truly dead, he adds, and that’s generally only when outside factors make it impractical to pursue the idea further.
Lessons Learned
Along with improving communication, increasing efficiency, and better managing resources, the new project management system has also helped Kirtland operate more like a large company, all without impacting staff churn.
“This new way of doing business didn’t drive turnover, but it certainly drove frustration,” Rarden says. “We just had to work through frustration, understand why, and re-educate as to why we’re doing these things.”
With a few years of this structure under his belt, Rarden is quick to note that this type of structure isn’t necessarily an overnight success and that there will be bumps and frustrations along the way. In fact, he repeatedly cites one phrase when discussing this experience: cultural evolution.
“Everybody conceptually understands the need for project management and accepts that they don’t have total carte blanche over their part of the business because now they’re answering to a bigger body,” he says. “The cultural acceptance is not as easy as it might sound. It’s a different level of business acumen. Even though we’ve been doing it for four years, we’re still fine-tuning things.”
Even after several years, Rarden says if he could start the process over again, he’d spend more time building buy-in from the executive team.
“I’d spend more time making sure the executive team can evangelize it and enforce it and help everyone else on their teams understand it,” he says.
Still, Rarden is adamant that the process is worth the effort.
“Sometimes we have to slow down so we can speed up,” he says. “This allowed employees to stop having to do things twice, which ultimately slowed things down. We always want to be nimbler and move quickly.”