Mining Company Portfolio Management Solution

The Client

This Client is the Iron Ore Division of a large Australian mining company, one of the world's largest iron ore producers. The Iron Ore Division manages mines in the iron rich Pilbara region of Western Australia and is a major supplier to Pacific Rim and European steel industries. The Client has approximately 35,000 employees and global annual revenue of over US $58 billion.

The Challenge

The Client was experiencing a rapid increase in the number of IT projects, driven by rapid business growth. Simultaneously, a large number of in-flight projects exhibited significant numbers of complex cost and resource dependencies. Since there was no visibility across all projects and their relationships, the Client was not in a position to manage its project portfolio in a controlled fashion.

Other key challenges included:

• IT was using 'makeshift' tools to manage the portfolio and responding to the demand for business growth across product groups and business units, relying on experience and 'gut feel' to managing the portfolio and auditing ROI.
• The prioritization of projects was flawed, where high-value projects were potentially lost in the noise and less important projects were progressed.
• Projects were operating in isolation as they were contextually unaware of their dependencies, both within a product group, business unit, and across the broader organization.

The Pcubed Solution

Pcubed created a fast, scientific approach to managing the project portfolio and the demand process, while linking the business and IT strategy plans. This ensured the selection and delivery of the highest value-adding projects that enable business growth.

Key elements of the solution included:

• Facilities for executive management to target capital spending on both geographical and functional areas as required based on strategic decisions.
• Holistic approach to manage the project portfolio across the organization, and forecast and highlight critical path risk dependencies based on cost and resources.
• Deployment of Microsoft Office Project Portfolio Server 2007.

The Results

The Client realized its intended benefit to have an IT governance framework in place to better manage the project portfolio across all of the organization, to ensure that the highest value projects are prioritized accordingly. The Client also realized savings by reducing administration time by two full-time PMO staff members who can now spend their time contributing to managing the portfolio.