Financial Services — Retail & Commercial Banking · Waterfall · Scotiabank (Bank of Nova Scotia)
Waterfall Project Manager Simulation — Scotiabank (Bank of Nova Scotia)
Lead Scotiabank's migration of 5,400 contact-centre agents across Canada, the US, Mexico, Chile, and Colombia from legacy Avaya to Genesys Cloud — bilingual EN/ES IVR rebuilds, a consolidated agent desktop, and carrier porting in five countries — before the Avaya support contract runs out. The platform is funded and well-sponsored; the test is the discipline to run a clean, boring, on-time program where the quiet shortcuts are what sink you. Gain hands-on project management experience over 27 days of real decisions, stakeholders, and PMO deliverables — no prior experience required.
The scenario
Scotiabank — Canada's most international bank — runs customer contact centres in five countries: Canada, the United States, Mexico, Chile, and Colombia. Together they handle the calls of millions of retail and commercial banking customers through 5,400 agents on a legacy Avaya on-premise platform that has been extended, customised, and patched for nine years. Avaya's support contract ends in eighteen months. The Contact Centre Modernization Program will migrate all five countries to Genesys Cloud — a cloud contact-centre platform — well before that deadline. This is not a rescue. The program is funded at $19.6M Canadian, the business case is signed, Genesys is selected, and your predecessor left a clean charter draft and an engaged sponsor. Three things make it real work rather than a lift-and-shift: the bilingual English/Spanish IVR rebuilds (plus English/French for Canada), each carrying country-specific regulatory disclosures; the consolidation of three to four separate agent tools into a single Genesys desktop that 5,400 agents have to actually adopt; and a five-country cutover sequence where carrier number-porting windows are fixed and unforgiving. You will run it as five waves, piloting in the smallest market first and letting that runbook carry the rest. Nothing here is on fire — and that is exactly the trap. The risks are quiet: a legacy call flow nobody documented, a translation nobody validated, a handoff between Toronto and Santiago that nobody owned, a training week the team wanted to shorten because 'it's just a phone system.' Your job is to keep a well-run program well-run — to make the cutovers so boring that no customer ever notices.
What you'll do as the project manager
- →Migrate all 5,400 agents across five countries from Avaya to Genesys Cloud by Day 27, ahead of the Avaya support end-of-life
- →Rebuild bilingual IVR (EN/ES for LATAM, EN/FR for Canada) with per-country regulatory disclosures, each validated by live call testing before its regional cutover
- →Consolidate three to four legacy agent tools into one Genesys agent workspace; achieve ≥90% agent login and ≤10% average-handle-time regression within two weeks of each regional cutover
- →Complete carrier/SIP migration and number porting for all five countries with zero customer-facing outage during any cutover window
- →Decommission the Avaya platform after the final wave, realising the support-cost savings that fund the business case
Project management skills you'll build
The challenges you'll navigate
- •The legacy Avaya environment carries nine years of accreted, partly-undocumented call flows, IVR menus, and routing rules across five countries — the migration is only as good as the discovery, and gaps surface at cutover, not before
- •The agent desktop consolidation replaces three to four tools per agent with one Genesys workspace for 5,400 agents — adoption, not technology, is the delivery risk, and rushed training shows up as post-cutover handle-time spikes
- •Bilingual IVR (EN/ES, plus Canada's EN/FR) carries regulator- and bank-mandated disclosure language per country — a missed or mistranslated disclosure is a compliance exposure, not a cosmetic bug
- •Cross-region coordination spans Toronto HQ plus four LATAM/US time zones — handoffs between the central platform team and regional ops leads are informal, and a dropped handoff is the most likely source of avoidable slip
- •Contingency at $0.8M (~4%) is modest for a five-country program — there is runway for diligence but not for rework
Technology & stakeholders
You'll manage 7 stakeholders, including Lorraine Beaudry (SVP, Global Customer Contact Centres), Desmond Clarke (Director, Enterprise PMO — Customer Channels), Hartej Sandhu (Lead Solutions Architect, Contact Centre Platforms), 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
Do I need project management experience to start?
No. This simulation is built for aspiring and practicing project managers alike — you learn by doing. You make real decisions and get feedback, with no PMP or prior PM job required.
How long does this simulation take?
It runs over 27 days, roughly 23 minutes per day, covering the full project lifecycle from initiation to closure.
What will I learn?
You practice the core of project management — stakeholder management, budget and schedule control, risk, scope, and PMO governance — in the context of waterfall in financial services — retail & commercial banking.
Is this based on the real Scotiabank (Bank of Nova Scotia)?
It's a realistic scenario inspired by Scotiabank (Bank of Nova Scotia) and the Financial Services — Retail & Commercial Banking sector. Details and names are fictionalized for training — it's a simulation, not a record of any actual project.
What do I get at the end?
A verified project completion plus the PMO deliverables you produced (charter, plan, SteerCo deck, closure) — proof of hands-on experience you can show employers.
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