Major Canadian Bank Portfolio and Resource Management Solution

Applying an enhanced suite of processes and tools to provide visibility, insight, and control.

The Client

The Client is a pre-eminent financial institution in Canada providing a broad range of retail banking, wealth management, and investment banking products and solutions. The Client also has a significant presence in United States as well as in other countries.

The Challenge

The Client's Technology and Services Division (T&S) provides IT planning, strategy and development, together with transaction processing, real estate, and sourcing services for the financial group. T&S is also responsible for the creation, development, and support of e-business. The T&S Division needed to provide a way to better manage the Client's project portfolio and its resources. However, facing disparate legacy applications for time reporting, project management and accounting would not make this an easy task.

Other key challenges included:

• Centralizing the key executive decision making information into a single, trusted source of information
• Streamlining project/program/organizational reporting and the reduction of 'side books'
• Manual, labor intensive processes surrounding resource capacity planning and workflow
• Need for a tool to provide visibility on resource allocation and capacity across all divisions and departments

The Pcubed Solution

Combining Pcubed's extensive knowledge of Portfolio, Program, and Project processes and tools, along with industry recognized best practices, Pcubed, formulated and articulated an operational vision that addresses the alignment of technology, processes, and people. The vision ensures that T&S was in a position to provide the best possible service to their clients.

Pcubed facilitated internal functional and non-functional requirements gathering and analysis through a series of cross-functional Joint Requirement Definition and Joint Application Design Sessions to elicit requirements and abstracting the 'real' requirements that would address the business pain points articulated by stakeholders. The team leveraged prototyping to provide iterative and interactive feedback to the end-users so as to add flexibility and agility to the process to ensure that the interpretation and abstraction of the functional requirements were correct. Throughout the engagement Pcubed provided the following services:

• On-site assessment of current project management applications and technical environments
• Guidance in planning and overall deployment, as well as assisting the management structure to prepare itself to leverage the solution across the enterprise
• The provision of prescriptive guidance and application of best practice methodology with respect to rolling out the EPM platform and providing both technical and application level mentoring and ongoing tutelage
• Installation and configuration of the Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution and the EPKSuite to deliver visibility, insight, and control over the planning and execution of their strategic and tactical initiatives
• The development of key application extensions and add-ons that automated many of the manual and timeconsuming Project Management activities such as aggregating data for forecasts and status reports
• Support and assist in the evolving design and delivery of the envisioned project management solution leveraging the Microsoft Office EPM Solution as its foundation
• The development of templates for processes and procedures (roles and responsibilities, project charters, security models, etc.)
• The implementation and delivery of hands-on mentoring, knowledge transfer, and training programs

Key elements of the solution included:

• Increased transparency of projects and on-going operations
• Increased organizational capability around portfolio planning and management
• Improved operational efficiency
• Increased agility and responsiveness from supporting systems
• Successful retirement of previous project/timesheet/portfolio systems
• Established project/program/portfolio standards
• Established highest standards for support, training, and mentoring solutions

The Results

Pcubed provided a single solution across 9 divisions to actively manage 2,600 projects simultaneously. The solution featured concise investment planning processes that resulted in 40% time savings of all involved analysts.

In addition to the retirement of several legacy applications, the portfolio and resource planning and budgeting process was replaced by a combination of the EPK-Suite and several custom extensions to the EPK Cost Management functionality resulting in a much more streamlined, flexible and auditable process. Moreover, to ensure that the Client was getting the most out of the EPK-Suite enhancements, there were multiple releases and iterations of the customizations to ensure platform currency, and more importantly, position the Client to take advantage of additional functionality when the need arises.

Additionally, internal programs, such as Investment Spend Optimization (ISO) were responsible for driving many of the changes that were delivered either through core functionality enhancements or custom extensions. Through the collective efforts of the Client, the EPK Group and Pcubed teams, many of the changes were implemented iteratively as required with minimal downtime and impact on the overall effectiveness of the planning process. To this end, the Development Portfolio Services group was able to react and provide more accurate and timely data for executive management, saving time and effort on all fronts of the planning process.