Customer Solution Corner #1

In the Customer Solution Corner we share real customer experiences across multiple sectors, delivery environments and levels of project and PMO maturity. We hope many readers who visit the Customer Solutions Corner will recognise and empathise with these experiences and find the solutions insightful and thought provoking.

The Customer Background and Contex

• A rapidly growing business with big ambitions in the financial services sector;
• A portfolio of business critical projects that needed to be delivered to fulfil the strategy and goals;
• An organisation with a low level of project delivery maturity but a desire to evolve without becoming over bureaucratic and text book!  
• A need for instant impact across the organisation with a tool that could add value within 15 days of signed contract.

The Customer Set Us Some Interesting Challenges

• The leadership team must have visibility of key projects and activities with better control of cost and benefit realisation;
• The CIO "I need Sponsors and delivery leads to assume accountability for delivery - they don't currently!"
• A need to improve quality and outcomes of governance meetings and use valuable leadership time to generate better discussion and decision making;
• Perform must have instant impact or momentum and credibility will go quickly – there must be full visibility of the portfolio within 10 days of signed contract;
• Perform must work with a low maturity organisation and help evolution to the next level;
• As a financially regulated business, a need for high levels of security and Single Sign On.

The Way We Tackled The Solution

• We facilitated a working session with some of our most experienced portfolio delivery team, the customer's PMO and the CIO to agree some outcome based success criteria for the first 3 months which included:
• Create a Perform instance and configure to rollout into ‘live’ within 10 days of receiving the purchase order as follows:
• Complete Perform system build and configuration to align with the customer’s portfolio environment and governance framework
• Load existing portfolio of projects with details, milestones, risks, issues etc.
• Deliver User, Super User and Viewer training ready for 'live'
• Support the users complete the first weekly report with over 90% report completion rate
• We defined a plan to rollout Perform with full visibility of the portfolio for leadership within 10 days
• We agreed the format and design for a set of automated portfolio reports, board packs, dashboards that the PMO would be able to generate with a single click from month 1.
• We agreed aimed to run the first monthly Portfolio Review Board meeting directly off Perform.
• We agreed to launch Single Sign On to make access and managing logins more simple and more secure.
• We set a target of creating a weekly report input structure that would take no more than 10 minutes per week and a monthly report input structure that would take no more than 20 minutes a month.
• We loaded a single project lifecycle into Perform, leaving the option for running Agile projects through Agile iterative stages on Perform when the business is ready.

The Results Of Our Combined Effort

• Perform with Single Sign On was successfully rolled out and ‘live’ as targeted;
• The leadership team now have full visibility and engagement with the portfolio;
• Project management time spent on reports has reduced to a minimum;
• The PMO time to prepare reports in consistent formats has been transformed so they can focus on more valuable work;
• The CIO is delighted and the PMO’s credibility has soared.

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