Treasury Management System Implementation Project Manager Simulation — BP plc

The scenario

BP plc is replacing its 15-year-old Wallstreet Suite Treasury Management System — provided by ION Group — with Kyriba Cloud Treasury. The existing system manages approximately £120B in annual cash flows across what turns out to be 847 bank accounts in 62 countries, though the business case presented to the board stated 'approximately 200 accounts' because nobody validated the number against the actual bank account master. The Wallstreet Suite instance has been heavily customized over its lifetime, with bespoke cash pooling configurations, custom SWIFT message formats, and tightly coupled integrations to SAP S/4HANA that were never properly documented. The Group Treasurer, Adam Sherwin, is under genuine pressure. ION has announced a 300% license cost increase effective in 9 months — taking BP's annual TMS licensing from £800K to £3.2M. The board approved the Kyriba replacement on the basis that a £4.8M one-time investment would eliminate this cost escalation permanently while modernizing Treasury operations. The urgency is real: if the project misses the ION renewal deadline, BP either pays the inflated license fee or operates without a TMS — neither is acceptable for a company processing £800M in daily payments. On paper, this looks straightforward. Kyriba's sales and delivery team conducted a 2-week scoping exercise and produced a deployment plan based on their 'standard implementation playbook' — 16 weeks, standard SWIFT connectivity, standard cash management configuration. Their Senior Delivery Manager, Daniel Kroeger, presented this with confidence. What the scoping exercise didn't uncover — because it relied on interviews rather than system analysis — is the true scale of bank connectivity, the complexity of BP's multi-currency cash pooling structures, the state of the FX hedge data, and the depth of SOX control requirements. You're stepping into what everyone believes is a simple cloud migration. It is not.

What you'll do as the project manager

• →Deploy Kyriba Cloud Treasury across UK and European Treasury operations, replacing Wallstreet Suite as the primary TMS within 27 simulation days (mapping to the 16-week contracted timeline)
• →Migrate SWIFT bank connectivity for 200+ bank accounts across all active banking partners, achieving successful payment transmission and statement reconciliation with zero missed payment cycles
• →Implement automated cash positioning across BP's 14 cash pooling structures, enabling same-day visibility of consolidated cash positions across 62 countries with less than 2% variance from Wallstreet Suite baseline
• →Migrate the FX hedge portfolio tracking for £3.1B in outstanding forward and option positions, ensuring accurate mark-to-market valuations and hedge effectiveness documentation for IFRS 9 compliance
• →Achieve SOX-compliant payment approval workflows — including segregation of duties, dual authorization thresholds, and complete audit trails — validated by Financial Risk & Controls before go-live

Project management skills you'll build

The challenges you'll navigate

• •ION license renewal deadline creates genuine schedule pressure — there is no fallback if the project slips significantly, forcing potential trade-offs between completeness and urgency
• •Bank connectivity migration carries direct operational risk — a SWIFT formatting error or connectivity failure could prevent BP from executing payments, impacting supplier relationships and trading operations
• •The Kyriba vendor scoping exercise was surface-level, based on interviews rather than system analysis — the actual complexity of BP's Treasury operations may significantly exceed what was assessed
• •The Treasury team carries change fatigue and institutional skepticism from a failed TMS upgrade attempt 3 years ago that wasted 6 months of their time before being abandoned
• •No dedicated data migration resource has been allocated in the project plan — data extraction, transformation, and validation for 15 years of Treasury data is currently unowned

Technology & stakeholders

You'll manage 7 stakeholders, including Kate Thomson (Chief Financial Officer), Adam Sherwin (Group Treasurer), Ravi Sanghani (VP IT Enterprise Applications), 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