Customer Solution Corner #3

In the Customer Solution Corner we share real customer experiences across multiple sectors, delivery environments and levels of portfolio, project and PMO maturity. We hope many readers who visit the Customer Solutions Corner will recognise and empathise with these experiences and find the solutions insightful and thought provoking.

• A global market leader in the distribution and logistics industry;
• Run an annual graduate programme with a significant portfolio of projects that the grads run;
• Grads need to provide regular reports and key insights to high profile Sponsors and key stakeholders;
• All graduates are working remotely from home;
• Absolute need for a centralised database/portal for portfolio and project information due to the remote and dispersed nature of the graduates and the execs;
• A need for a single solution to plan & run the portfolio, manage escalations and manage governance meetings directly off a single platform.  

The Customer Set Us Some Interesting Initial Challenges

• Perform must act as the central repository for the graduates to run their projects and engage the exec team. Perform needs to enable good quality:
  • Project planning;
  • Risk & Issue management 
  • Delivery escalations
  • Regular reporting (concise and visual)
  • Governance meetings
• Perform needs to enable instant access to project and portfolio insights for sponsors and stakeholders
• Perform must be intuitive enough for grads to be able to adopt and use successfully with minimal training and disruption. 
• Perform needs to support the personal development of the graduates.

The Solution Had to be Agile and Evolve as the Customer's Needs Evolved

• The Kivue Customer Solutions Consultant initiated a regular review with the customer to continually review progress and explore opportunities to optimise the value Perform was realising across the portfolio and for the graduates. As a result Perform was reconfigured and tailored to meet their ongoing evolution of needs:
• It became apparent that the logs for managing changes to scope and lessons learned were being stored outside of Perform in Excel spreadsheets. The existing spreadsheet templates were provided to the Kivue Customer Solutions Consultant who configured Perform within a week so the customer could migrate to a central repository for all scope changes and lessons learned. 
• The terminology, output formats and data insights that the sponsors and key stakeholders wanted had changed slightly from the initial configuration. This was revisited and the reports were customised to meet the new set of requirements.
• Kivue then assisted with user guides and manuals displaying the new configuration to make it easy for the graduates, sponsors and key stakeholders to engage with the insights in Perform.
• Kivue were then asked to provide some simple user video's to offer an engaging platform to explore how to optimise the use of Perform and reduce the questions coming into the PMO!

The Results Of Our Combined Effort

• The annual graduate programme was extremely successfully delivered and Perform will now be a fundamental pillar for future grads to work with each year.
• Perform both supported the personal development of the graduates but also gave them a high profile with senior executives in the business.
• Perform demonstrated how adaptable, flexible and easy it is to support an organisation whose needs are evolving all the time from a demanding set of key stakeholders.
• Perform was rolled out across the graduate project portfolio within days
• Perform proved how easy it is for graduates to learn and operate to generate key insights in concise and visually engaging formats to high profile senior management.
• The client has been able to reduce manual effort/ cost as well as the vulnerability of multiple spreadsheets by using Perform as a central repository for all Risks/ Issues/ Lessons Learned and Change management
• The sponsors and key stakeholders were delighted with the concise and visual Perform outputs which enabled them to engage with project insights and escalations on their mobile devices.

A slightly different Customer Solution Corner for you this week; showing you the in-flight care and adaptability of Perform!

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