Q&A: Financial Firms Boost Employee Engagement with Clarity

The financial industry is highly competitive. It’s essential that companies are able to have the right people working on the right things at all times, and that resources are as fully utilized as possible. At the typical scale financial companies need, that can be a challenge. We spoke to a number of companies to understand how they go about managing such large, complex operations.

What are the challenges you need to overcome to be successful?

Our firm, for example, has about 12,000 employees and contractors working on our IT initiatives. That’s a lot of people with different roles, reporting lines, and commitments. It’s also a tremendous number of projects to support. We need to be able to see all resources across all functions and allocations in order to understand where our current and upcoming bottlenecks are, where we have opportunities, and where we have over- or under-allocation issues.

How do you go about addressing those problems?

It can’t be through a standard approach. We need to be able to deliver work using traditional, Agile, and increasingly hybrid ways of working; a single standard process and resource pool, therefore, doesn’t work. Instead, we need a tool that supports different ways of working while still providing us with a complete picture of resourcing. We also require the ability to report, analyze, and model resource availability and utilization to optimize performance.

We need to be able to connect work with strategy so that we understand the business impact of our resourcing decisions and challenges. We also need to be able to quickly understand how variances between planned and actual resource needs impact performance. All stakeholders need to see information in a context that makes sense for them – resource owners seeing what their people were doing, project managers understanding where their challenges and bottlenecks were, and so on.

What do you do, and how does it help?

We use Broadcom’s Clarity platform, which gives us exactly what we need. We can assign resources using individuals or roles, monitor actual vs. planned utilizations, and report on all areas where we have challenges and opportunities. We can also model different project schedules and mixes to understand resource impacts. Clarity’s insights give us a level of understanding of our resources that we just haven’t had before.

We do the same thing using Broadcom’s Value Stream Management (VSM) solution that combines the Clarity platform with Rally. As an increasing amount of our work moves to Agile, our teams can operate in Rally while we can consolidate resource information from all work management tools in Clarity, helping us understand what’s happening across all work delivery approaches. It makes resource decisions faster and easier, and improves those decisions’ effectiveness and efficiency.

How is this driving your success?

Companies always say that people are their most important asset, and it’s true. When we are able to better understand what’s happening with our resource utilization and allocation, not only are we more effective and efficient, but we are also able to improve employee engagement and motivation. Every individual feels that the organization better understands the situation that they are in, and feels that their workload is better balanced.

Additionally, the fact that Broadcom’s solution connects work directly with strategies allows all our people to understand how they are contributing to the success of the business. That’s powerful, and drives even greater performance.