Jaguar Land Rover

Pcubed Project Management expertise enlisted to manage the separation of Jaguar Land Rover IT from Ford Motor Company.

The Client

Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) is a business built around two great British car brands with exceptional design and engineering capabilities. Jaguar Land Rover’s manufacturing facilities are in the UK.

The Jaguar Land Rover business employs over 16,000 people, predominantly in the UK, including some 3,500 engineers at two product development centers, in Coventry and Warwickshire.

Jaguar Cars, founded in 1922, is one of the world’s premier manufacturers of luxury saloons and sports cars. Land Rover has been manufacturing 4x4s since 1948. Its products have defined the segments in which they operate.

JLR sell cars in almost 100 countries, supported by 18 National Sales Companies in major markets, and importers in others.

The Challenge

In order to ensure business continuity and financial stability of Jaguar Land Rover the SWIFT Program was conceived to manage the separation of JLR I.T from Ford Motor Company following the sale of JLR to Tata Motors, within 18 months.

The Program focuses on the separation of IT components of the business; this covers the applications, data, physical infrastructure, communications and services.

The client was facing an extraordinary set of challenges, including that of the National Sales Companies (NSCs, or "markets"), which conduct JLR Business around the world. These are separate legal entities, owned by JLR. Since each market has different applications, business circumstances and capabilities, each represents a separate project to achieve transition. This is a considerable planning, acting and tracking exercise. There were 21 NSCs at the start of the Program, using a broad mix of IT, including major central applications and locally managed systems.

Other key challenges included:

The SWIFT Program was structured around the concept of Groups, each responsible for applications from particular business areas, or for elements of infrastructure. One effect of this approach was that the Program focused on the central provision of the applications, and gave limited consideration to the impact on the markets.

For example, there was no clear view of the Program from the perspective of the markets. The Group concept had little meaning for them, and they were interested instead in the elements that would affect them most directly.

Within the NSCs, project management and technical capabilities varied greatly, as did their ability to plan their part of transition effectively. Each would therefore need an approach adapted to its particular needs.

Against this background, the challenge was to transition more than 200 applications to the new JLR environment, whilst the underlying infrastructure was replaced, and alongside other JLR-led projects such as SAP deployment in a few of the larger markets.

The Pcubed Solution

Pcubed was selected across the entire Program to provide program, project management and PMO specialist skills. For the transition of the NSCs' systems, Pcubed applied core elements of its Disciplined Delivery approach, including:

• Appointed a project manager to support a JLR group leader and lead a team of TATA Technologies specialists.
• Ensured that the scoping, planning and resourcing of deliverables were robustly defined at project start.
• Created and delivered new PM control processes and reporting metrics, aligning project and business objectives and giving clear visibility to stakeholders.
• Implemented robust project planning and scheduling based around specifically defined milestones and project gateways.
• Set up and rolled out effective communication processes between the central program and NSCs.
• Coached and mentored the team to build their PM skills and delivery capability.
• Created market-centric reporting, providing its clients with a unique, program-wide view from the clients' perspective.
• Took the lead in developing an NSC Scorecard to capture NSC transition Status, Risks and Issues to support Jaguar Land Rover CIO in key stakeholder meetings.
• Established an assurance process to manage central program risks to the NSCs.

The Results

• The JLR National Sales Companies' applications were transitioned successfully within the overall scope of the SWIFT Program.
• Knowledge transfer of new applications and infrastructure environments was carried out for central JLR support service teams, securing the benefits of the successful transition