Continuing our panel discussion with leading telecommunications companies, we wanted to explore how these businesses ensure their projects are ready to be delivered – that they have business and legal approval, that they’re appropriately scheduled and prioritized, etc. Here are some thoughts from the industry.
Q: What are the challenges you need to overcome to be successful?
A: For us, it’s been the absence of an automated or consistent approach to ensuring IT readiness for new project initiatives. We are never sure where projects are; we have initiatives that are years old that appear to have just been abandoned without being formally closed out, and delays are prevalent. Worse, we often have no visibility into what is going to be successful.
Q: How do you go about addressing those problems?
A: We decided to create a single automated workflow that can handle everything from the business casing, legal reviews, scheduling, etc., through to the ultimate creation of the project for our IT teams to work on. Our workflow solution needed to be able to adjust to the varying requirements of different projects and provide clear and accurate reporting that drives better decision making.
Q: What do you do, and how does it help?
A: We selected Clarity by Broadcom Software, and we’ve used it to create a portfolio for each of the business units we support. Every one of the approximately 6,000 new projects we get each year across those business units has then been added to Clarity, and a custom workflow manages the entire readiness process.
We have layered reporting on top to provide each business unit with insight into the progress of their portfolio and to provide the ability to review each individual initiative. We have built integrations with other systems to ensure the entire end-to-end process is supported – and we’re using built-in monitoring capabilities to identify any delays or bottlenecks.
Q: How is this driving your success?
A: To date, we have saved $2.6 million in just one of the business area portfolios. That comes from more effective and efficient management, the elimination of wastage in the process, and automated workflows. On top of that, there are the benefits of making better decisions in less time, and identifying and resolving problems quicker. We got a “manage my project” button through Clarity that does everything we need.
We’re planning to add three more business units as additional portfolios to Clarity, streamlining things even further. We now have confidence that any project created from this process is truly ready for us to allocate IT resources to and deliver the value that drives our customer and business success.
