Cloud Migration Project Manager Simulation — Royal Bank of Canada (RBC)

The scenario

Royal Bank of Canada is three waves into a publicly-announced, multi-year strategic cloud partnership with Microsoft — moving workloads off RBC-operated data centres and onto Microsoft Azure under a hardened set of landing zones. Waves 1 and 2 migrated lower-risk corporate and analytics workloads and were, by the program's own account, the easy part. Wave 3 is where the partnership meets the bank's core: a tranche of wholesale banking and capital-markets workloads — treasury, pricing-and-risk, reference data, and post-trade processing — that the front office and the application owners have run on-prem for fifteen years. The platform side is ready. Azure landing zones are built and certified, ExpressRoute circuits are live, and the Microsoft FastTrack team is mobilized. The business case is signed, the budget is approved at $46.5M CAD, and the partnership's published wave plan has Wave 3 completing within the quarter. On paper, this is an execution job: rationalize the application portfolio (retire, re-host, or re-platform each workload), harden the landing zone for capital-markets data, prove production parity for every workload, and decommission the on-prem instance. The portfolio rationalization and the landing-zone hardening are tractable. The people are not. Every workload in Wave 3 has an owner who built it, tuned it, and trusts the building it lives in — and who reads 'migrate to Azure' as 'hand control of my trading platform to a team I don't manage, on someone else's infrastructure, to satisfy a partnership announcement I never asked for.' OSFI expects production parity and a credible operational-resilience posture before decommission, which gives those owners a legitimate veto dressed as diligence. You have been brought in as the IT Project Manager to deliver Wave 3 — but your real job is getting application owners who are comfortable, competent, and unconvinced to commit to a cutover when the current setup works fine.

What you'll do as the project manager

• →Migrate the Wave 3 wholesale banking and capital-markets workload tranche from RBC on-prem data centres to Microsoft Azure within the $46.5M CAD baseline and the published quarter-end wave window
• →Complete application-portfolio rationalization for every Wave 3 workload — a retire / re-host / re-platform disposition with the application owner's signed concurrence
• →Achieve a production-parity attestation for each workload (functional, performance, and resilience parity vs. the on-prem baseline) before any on-prem instance is decommissioned
• →Stand up the capital-markets landing zone with Information Security and Enterprise Risk sign-off against OSFI B-13 operational-resilience expectations and RBC data-residency controls
• →Decommission the migrated on-prem workloads on the agreed run-rate, releasing the data-centre footprint committed in the partnership business case

Project management skills you'll build

The challenges you'll navigate

• •Capital-markets application owners (Grant Tasker's group) have not committed to cutover dates; their workloads are the highest-risk, highest-visibility part of Wave 3 and their concurrence is the program's defining dependency
• •Wave 3 inherits an assumption that on-prem dependencies are documented — but the shared-service entanglements between trading, reference-data, and post-trade systems were never fully mapped, and the owners who know them are the ones resisting
• •The capital-markets landing-zone control posture has not yet cleared Information Security; OSFI B-13 operational-resilience evidence for systemically-important workloads is thinner than the gate will require
• •Contingency at $2.1M (4.5%) is reasonable for a re-host wave but thin for a tranche carrying re-platform candidates; a single workload slipping to re-platform consumes it fast
• •The Microsoft FastTrack scope is fixed; if a workload needs net-new engineering beyond the partnership master agreement, the addendum lead time is ~3 weeks and lands on the critical path

Technology & stakeholders

You'll manage 6 stakeholders, including Geneviève Caron (SVP, Enterprise Cloud & Infrastructure), Padma Sundaresan (Director, Technology PMO — Cloud Migration Programs), Devin Acheampong (Principal Cloud Architect, Azure Landing Zone), and more.

What you'll walk away with

A verified, shareable record of a completed enterprise project — plus the PMO deliverables you produced along the way (charter, project plan, SteerCo deck, closure document). It's real, demonstrable project management experience you can put on your resume and speak to in interviews.

Frequently asked questions

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