Data Center Consolidation / M&A Integration Project Manager Simulation — BMO Financial Group

The scenario

When BMO bought Bank of the West, the headline was retail scale — 1.8 million new customers and roughly 500 added U.S. branches. The 83-hour systems conversion in September 2023 moved those customers onto BMO's platforms. What it did not move was the iron. Bank of the West's residual workloads — internal applications, batch processing, reconciliation engines, and the infrastructure that was never in scope for the customer conversion — still run on two leased colocation floors in Sacramento and Santa Clara, California. You are the IT Project Manager brought in to finish the integration the conversion left behind: lift roughly 180 applications and 640 servers off the California floor and into BMO's North American hosting footprint, then exit and decommission both colocation facilities. The Transition Services Agreement that once covered this hosting has lapsed. The only thing keeping the California floor alive is the colocation leases — and the provider has confirmed the Sacramento lease will not be renewed. So the cutover date does not move. Neither does the bar the regulators set: every Tier-1 workload needs parallel-run evidence that satisfies both the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency and Canada's OSFI — two supervisors who do not define 'proven' the same way. Your job is to get every workload across before the lease runs out, and to be able to prove, to two regulators who disagree on what proof looks like, that nothing broke.

What you'll do as the project manager

• →Migrate 100% of residual Bank of the West workloads (~180 applications, ~640 servers) off the California colocation floor before the leases expire.
• →Exit and decommission both California colocation facilities (Sacramento and Santa Clara) with zero customer-facing outage.
• →Secure OCC (U.S.) and OSFI (Canada) parallel-run sign-off on every Tier-1, core-impacting workload before final cutover.
• →Deliver within the $48.0M capital budget and the fixed cutover window driven by lease expiry.
• →Hand operational ownership of migrated workloads to BMO Enterprise Hosting with complete runbooks and zero undocumented dependencies.

Project management skills you'll build

The challenges you'll navigate

• •Fixed, non-extendable colocation lease expiry creates an immovable cutover deadline with no schedule float.
• •The Bank of the West application dependency map is incomplete and partly undocumented — integration surprises are likely mid-migration.
• •OCC and OSFI hold divergent expectations for parallel-run evidence, risking a Tier-1 workload being 'proven' to one regulator but not the other.
• •Key retained Bank of the West infrastructure staff hold operational knowledge in their heads and may leave before handover.
• •Limited spare capacity and change-freeze windows in BMO's receiving data centers compress the usable cutover calendar.

Technology & stakeholders

You'll manage 7 stakeholders, including Gordon Healy (SVP, U.S. Integration Delivery), Curtis Yamamoto (Director, Integration PMO), Hank Delgado (VP, Infrastructure Engineering (retained, Bank of the West)), 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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