Media companies operate in a tough world. With 24 million customers across seven European countries this company had a very diverse demand to meet, and it had to do it effectively and efficiently. That brought a number of unique challenges. Here’s an excerpt from a recent discussion on Clarity.
What were the challenges you needed to overcome to be successful?
Our project management office (PMO) was flying blind. We were trying to manage work across a slew of unintegrated applications, spreadsheets and clouds and we just didn’t have the visibility we needed to make intelligent decisions. We simply couldn’t get a reliable financial view of the portfolio, and that’s a problem when you are spending more than 150 million Euros in capital expenditure each year. We were eroding our financial performance by not being able to identify cost overruns until it was too late.
If that weren’t enough, we also had to integrate a new European acquisition and we simply couldn’t do that in such a chaotic environment.
How did you go about addressing those problems?
We knew we wanted a single platform for all of our projects. That was the only way we could get an accurate and complete picture. We also wanted to minimize disruption for our employees – including those in the newly acquired entity. So, we were looking for the right solution with an easy migration path that would allow us to improve our effectiveness and efficiency immediately.
What did you do, and how did it help?
We chose Broadcom’s Clarity solution. We were able to immediately build and configure robust workflows, allocate resources and manage budgets across our entire portfolio. Our PMO was able to quickly see approved funding for each project and monitor spend rates including accurate, timesheet driven resource costs. That allowed the PMO to put spend controls in place and led to a huge improvement in financial management.
That improvement in turn allowed executives to make better decisions. They can now see which projects are delivering value and which aren’t, and they can adjust investments accordingly. Not only is this increasing business value, it’s directly contributing to better customer value, which is critical in our industry due to the competition.
We were also able to integrate with our financial system to keep the P&L ledger current, and most critically we were able to retire our standalone, obsolete tools. Our users loved the new system, they found it completely intuitive and adapted with no issues at all. It’s now in the process of being rolled out to all of our users.
How is this driving your success?
We’re expecting to see an improvement of between 20% and 25% in project management productivity by the time the solution is rolled out to all users. That’s a massive lift and will allow us to invest in more projects and deliver more value. By eliminating wastage and diverting funds away from unprofitable initiatives it will also translate into greater profitability.
Our efficiency is improved because we are eliminating so many obsolete tools and reducing the time and effort needed to plan. In particular the drag and drop roadmapping functionality is reducing the amount of work needed to plan by a massive amount, and the easy-to-use timesheets are reducing overhead and improving compliance. As we become more familiar with the tool we fully anticipate that it will replace multiple other project planning and delivery tools.
