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Bringing e-signatures to IG Wealth Management's advisors

Walter's prior experience · Slalom · IG Wealth Management

The situation

IG Wealth Management's advisors relied on paper for client signatures and forms, often digitizing them after the fact. IG and Slalom were building a digital Advisor Portal on Salesforce, with electronic signatures as one of its guided workflows. When Walter took on the signature workstream, the delivery plan no longer matched the pace the team was actually delivering.

The key judgment

Plan from the remaining backlog and the team's measured delivery pace, not the original estimate, and change how the team works to close the gap instead of defending a date the numbers don't support. Keep IG's business lead involved throughout, so decisions and feedback don't wait until release.

What Walter did

  • Led delivery of the e-signature workstream on Salesforce Financial Services Cloud, with a team of up to 15 engineers, testers and business analysts.
  • Reforecast the remaining scope from the team's measured velocity and reset the plan with IG.
  • Restructured the team and co-located it, so engineers, testers and analysts could work through delivery issues together.
  • Brought IG's business lead into sprint reviews and planning, so decisions and feedback happened throughout delivery.
  • Worked with the change-management effort so advisors could pick up the new workflow.

What happened, and the limits

E-signatures went live inside IG's Advisor Portal. Advisors could send signature requests from within their workflow and get completed forms back digitally. The broader portal rolled out to about 5,000 users across Canada. That figure is for the portal as a whole; no adoption or productivity figure is claimed for the signature work.

A plan is a hypothesis; the team's measured pace is the evidence. It's why every Maple Spark Labs Sprint captures a baseline first and every pilot has exit criteria agreed before it starts.

This was Walter's work at Slalom, not a Maple Spark Labs engagement or an AI implementation. It does not imply any endorsement by IG Wealth Management or Slalom.

Slalom's 2020 announcement (opens in a new tab) describes the broader Advisor Portal and its electronic-signature capability.

Have paperwork slowing a team down? Ways to work with us
Bringing e-signatures to IG Wealth Management's advisorsWalter's delivery approach, simplified; not a client artifact.
  1. Reassess the remaining work
    The backlog as it stood, with the technical leads.
  2. Replan from measured pace
    Not from the original estimate.
  3. Involve the business
    In refinement and demonstrations, throughout.
  4. Release
    Live within the Advisor Portal.

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