Project Portfolio Management for a Transportation CompanyA Work Management Solution was implemented, allowing for the resolution of a de-centralised project register, manual workflows, disparate processes, in-consistent project templates and lack of reporting. The one stop work management solution enabled leaders by providing the governance and structure required to save costs, improve quality, increase project velocity and in turn improve stakeholder satisfaction
Following a staged implementation approach adapted to the organization’s roadmap and internal transformation activities, Acensys drove a programme focused on transforming and digitizing their existing manual project management processes onto the work management platform thus automating many of the manual tasks.
Challenges
The requirement for a work management solution stems from the need to resolve key business problems being faced by the Transport Organisation.
Disparate manual processes and de-centralised data
The organisation was highly dependent on manual processes. Board meetings involved numerous printed copies of excel and word documents. Decisions were recorded with ‘wet’ signatures. Procedures such as submitting multiple excel sheets with numerous different versions, made it increasingly difficult to manage. A result of these manual processes was the fact that data was being transferred and decisions were made over multiple mediums. It was a tedious process to understand progress made, decisions taken and to find the most reliable up-to-date data.
Detailed Multi-Level Budget Approval Processes
The organisation was highly dependent on manual processes. Board meetings involved numerous printed copies of excel and word documents. Decisions were recorded with ‘wet’ signatures. Procedures such as submitting multiple excel sheets with numerous different versions, made it increasingly difficult to manage. A result of these manual processes was the fact that data was being transferred and decisions were made over multiple mediums. It was a tedious process to understand progress made, decisions taken and to find the most reliable up-to-date data.
Lack of portfolio management and reporting
The lack of strategic governance led to inadequate prioritisation of projects, not being able to realise the benefits, increased time to market and higher failure rates. A large contributor to the lack of portfolio management was the inability to provide reliable reporting and tools required by the leadership team to make strategic decisions. Without this data the organisation was not able to accurately ensure an appropriate mix of high and low risk and long term and short-term projects. This had a negative effect on the organisation achieving its operational and financial goals.
Solution
Acensys took a data-based process improvement approach to the challenges. With clear understanding of the organisations business requirement and goals; Acensys steered the organisation in the selection of the most appropriate work management solution. Acensys then worked with the organisation through implementation, launch and hyper-care to customise/configure the work management solution in order to meet the business requirements.
With the migration of legacy manual processes onto the new work management solution; Acensys was able to remove waste, digitize and automate part of the project processes. A concomitant to processes digitization was the standardising of processes across the organisation. The organisation was now able to improve efficiency by implementing best practice structure processes across the organisation promoting productivity, create relatability among leaders; everyone is using the same templates and processes and thus “speaking the same language” and this sets up the platform to predict and achieve consistent results.
The use of a work management solution gave the organisation a centralised database to hold all communications, documents, and approvals. With all information held a central location which can be accessed remotely, the organisation was able to minimise e-mails, daily stand up’s, calls, video conferences, data duplication, lost approvals, unclarity of progress etc. The work management solution became the one source of truth which all stakeholders had access to.
With the wide adoption of the work management solution and all data centralised, the organisation was able to generate reliable reporting on the health of the projects and the entire portfolio. This information gave leaders an in-depth view of their project progress, on-going costs, resource allocations, risks, issue and decisions needed. This data was accessible in a click of a button and displayed in an easy to digest dashboard. The benefit of extensive reporting in addition to the use of portfolio management functionality, leaders are now able to make educated decisions on which programs/projects to progress forward, allocation of funds, alignment to strategy and the data required to make GO/Kill/Hold/Fix Decisions at the strategic and operational level.
Overall, Acensys were able to target the business challenges faced and implement an effective yet flexible solution. Acensys also placed a large focus to ensure the system was user friendly and easily adopted by working in an agile approach through multiple iterations of gather-test-configure cycles.
Results
- Many of the routine tasks that used to take project managers many hours to action, track and follow-up on were now initiated with just few clicks. PMs can now focus on managing higher value tasks in the project lifecycle. This resulted in a monthly time saving of 25% per project manager.
- Data entry was simplified with all necessary information accessible with minimum navigation through the system.
- The ability to see every update, approval and decision made by whom and when, increased the reliability of information.
- Through reporting, dashboards and layouts, each actor of the process was displayed only the meaningful data to avoid over-exposure to information.
- The highly customised persona focused interphase enabled rapid adoption by stakeholders of all levels from project managers to executives and sponsors.
- Automated approvals process reflecting the company’s scheme of delegation ensuring decisions are directed to the appropriate decision maker.
- The agreed approval flows also allowed finance releases to happen in a day when it took a week previously.
- The entire increased velocity due to automation led to an additional CapEx spend per year of £1,507,000.
Contact us at the Acensys Limited office nearest to you or submit a business inquiry online.
I would like to thank Acensys Consulting for their tremendous support during the recent migration from our existing SAP environment to our New Oracle ERP service. Their role and contribution were critical to the success of this project, helping us translate our Business Objectives into a clear approach and helping us select an SI for the delivery phase. The Acensys team drove the implementation project over a very aggressive 6 month timeframe to ensure that we achieved a critical Business milestone of launching the service in September 19.
With the support of Acensys Consulting we have been able to accelerate the cloud transformation of or Global Infrastructure Delivery unit. Our new operating model easily scales to meet future demand and infrastructure can be implemented faster and more flexible to meet our customers’ needs.
Acensys Consulting was instrumental in setting up and driving our Data Centre Migration programme to its conclusion. They brought leadership, vision and execution capabilities and helped us deliver our target operations model and strategic data centre migration.
Acensys Consulting helped us to develop our Application Operations Transformation Strategy and successfully managed several key programmes to deliver our strategy. Acensys consultants brought thought leadership and strategy but with a hands-on, pragmatic approach to turn strategy into reality. They are not afraid to escalate issues but are quite good at building support across the organisation for change.
