Leading online technology company leverages a PMO for significant delivery improvement.

BUSINESS CHALLENGE
The company was faced with multiple challenges due to phenomenal growth over the last three to four years, and they were starting to experience difficulties in program/project delivery and management, including:

• Visibility around existing projects was limited and an accurate status for any given project often took a day of executives' time to pull together.
• Many projects were without the needed leadership of project management.
• Requests for new business capabilities were being received at all levels of the organization with limited accountability or traceability. This left executives with limited visibility into the project portfolio and made prioritization and alignment with key business objectives difficult.
• Little structure existed to manage large business projects, especially those involving external vendors.
• Staff members were not always working on the initiatives with the highest return.

The online technology company knew it needed to bring in a partner who understood how to build a project management office (PMO) and associated operations in order to streamline their IT delivery capability and get the most from their project portfolio investment.

COVESTIC'S SOLUTION
Covestic was able to assess the company's unique challenges and quickly determine a roadmap and implementation plan to significantly improve IT delivery. Our methodology allowed for a quick implementation of a PMO in one business quarter, establishing:

• Processes to provide visibility into their complete IT project portfolio.
• Processes to manage the many pending requests.
• An IT governance body to review and prioritize current projects and future requests.
• Processes for requesting and initiating new projects, prioritizing the current projects, managing limited resources, and managing a project.
• Deliverable-based milestones for each project that follow the software development life cycle (SDLC).
• A repository for all project deliverables, knowledgebase materials, and documentation templates.
• Project management staff to allow executives to focus on their own duties in the future.

PROJECT RESULTS
Remarkable results were realized within the first quarter. For the first time, executives had visibility into their complete IT project portfolio as well as the pending requests, providing the material necessary for governance of the IT investments. Other significant results included:

• Projects were being shut down because there was insufficient return on investment.
• All requests were known and assessed prior to executive approval and project initiation.
• Projects were prioritized so resource management could be done to make sure those with the highest priority were delivered on time.
• An unprecedented number of projects with increasing complexity and partner integrations were implemented in the first two business quarters.
• Projects that had failed to launch three times previously were finally delivered.

This improved the confidence in and within the IT organization significantly. There was now a sustainable process for managing the growth that had occurred and enabling future growth for the online technology company.