California State Automobile Association (CSAA)

Pcubed designed and implemented standardized program and project management systems to avoid schedule and cost overruns.

The Client

The California State Automobile Association (CSAA), the second largest affiliate of the national AAA organization, serves more than 4 million members from its San Francisco headquarters. Its 6000+ employees generate over US$2 billion in revenues from a wide array of automotive, travel, insurance and financial services.

The Challenge

CSAA's project management office (PMO) was formed in 1999 to improve its information systems execution. Re-branded as the Enterprise Portfolio Management Office (EPMO), it now realized that CSAA was taking on even bigger and more complex programs in-house than ever before. EPMO leadership knew that they needed to implement some type of risk mitigation program, as they estimated that up to one third of CSAA's projects might experience schedule and cost overruns if they did nothing. EPMO was looking for best-in-class project plans, accountability control, and the ability to consistently estimate, plan, drive cost, and adhere to schedule. CSAA had focused well on Portfolio Management, and now wanted their Program/Project Management capabilities to be equally strong.

Other key challenges included:

To meet this challenge, Pcubed and CSAA proactively and quickly undertook a gap analysis that covered infrastructure, processes and organization. Several common themes appeared:

• Existing tools did not support the streamlining of processes or effective compliance to standards
• Executive reporting required extensive data manipulation with questionable accuracy
• Project teams were overworked resulting in less than satisfactory performance

The Pcubed Solution

Using a cutting edge approach, based on Microsoft technology, Pcubed designed and implemented specialized processes and infrastructure to manage risks, issues, documents, inter-project dependencies, resource supply and cost. This innovative method resulted in a central repository database, which significantly improved automation for team members and increased visibility and control for managers and executives. What's more, Pcubed created driver-based work plans supporting the key initiatives. Specifically, using the defined processes and planning standards, Pcubed worked with CSAA to create workplans for all high priority projects. This allowed for greater accountability for project team, sponsor and executives.

To make sure projects delivered value, Pcubed implemented Earn Value Analysis (EVA). These tools and techniques identified whether projects were on target with cost and schedule and what action should be taken to correct any risk. This advancement now lets CSAA track the Earned Value against their entire strategic initiative plans instead of just a few. In addition, standardized process adherence reports implemented by Pcubed allowed:

• All the plans to be well maintained, at high quality, to monitor how effective CSAA managers were at complying with the new processes
• A dramatic increase in CSAA Project Managers' ability to keep plans up to date as a result of a reward program that was implemented and tied directly to the measurement reports that Pcubed put into place
• Better quality of data, allowing senior managers to have real-time visibility of project and program delivery status

Key elements of the solution included:

• Consistent delivery across all projects
• Integration of risks and issues into plans to facilitate change impact assessment
• The generation of a single, program-wide view with minimum resource overhead
• Thorough program reporting to peers across the enterprise and to management
• Real-time visibility of project and program delivery status for all senior managers
• The assurance of a cultural fit that could be easily adopted by current and future staff members