If you’re running the projects at the largest Islamic bank in the Middle East, using PowerPoint and Excel you know things have to change. And if you’ve just been appointed to head up the bank’s transformation efforts, it’s on you to deliver. We spoke with someone who found themselves in exactly this situation.
What were the challenges you needed to overcome to be successful?
We had no central project management system – nothing. Business cases were completed in Excel and PowerPoint and projects were managed using PowerPoint and Word templates. It took us well into Q2 to review and approve or reject all project proposals, and we only delivered 50-60% of the projects we approved. We had no insight into what was happening on any of those initiatives.
How did you go about addressing those problems?
We knew we needed to implement am investment-planning solution and it had to be something that could be rolled out to all users and gain acceptance – everyone from the CEO to project team members. At the same time, the solution needed to be implemented quickly – our transformation needed to accelerate, and we needed to improve the governance and oversight approach to every step in the process.
What did you do, and how did it help?
We selected Clarity from Broadcom, and we implemented it in conjunction with on of their tier one partners. The difference was immediate. We were instantly able to see what was happening with all of our projects, we had all business case information in a single location, and we could produce numerous dashboards with just a single click of a button. The speed of proposal reviews and approvals increased dramatically – we were able to review three times as many projects in the same timeframe and we now have no backlog of proposals awaiting review.
We were also able to shift to what we refer to as ‘presentation-less’ approvals – because all of the information is available to all stakeholders there is no need to present each proposal before it is considered. All our stakeholders no know what is approved, what is planned and what is in progress – and they are able to see the status of all those initiatives. We have also built-in analytics to alert if any projects appear to be deviating from expectations – if budget consumption is lagging for example.
The Broadcom partner helped us implement a solution that is accepted and used by all employees and that now managers hundreds of billions of dollars’ worth of investments. It’s allowed out project governance and oversight to go from zero to hero almost overnight – we implemented everything from initial concept to completion in just five months.
How is this driving your success?
Without Clarity, and without the support of the tier one Broadcom partner we simply couldn’t have succeeded in this initiative. We are now able to accelerate our business transformation efforts with greater confidence because we have real insight into what’s happening. That in turn is allowing us to look at initiatives like the migration from projects to products within IT.
The implementation wasn’t at all disruptive with all users adapting to the system with no large scale training requirements and everyone working on projects is now more effective and efficient, directly driving increased value for every project we deliver.