Customer Solution Corner #2

In the Customer Solution Corner we share real customer experiences across multiple sectors, delivery environments and levels of 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.

The Customer Background and Context

• A financial services commission for a government. 
• A wide ranging portfolio which needed to be communicated with updates to key stakeholders; even more so due to COVID-19 and the challenges of remote working.
• An organisation fairly low in project maturity stage but working towards best practice.
• A need for Perform to 'hit the ground running' and generate high impact early on with all data loaded and credible executive reports 'live' within 20 days of contract signature. 

The Customer Set Us Some Interesting Challenges

• Create a single source of the truth and repository across the whole portfolio of projects:
• Have a centralised database where all project information and reporting is stored;
• Implement an executive friendly and easy to access visualisation of portfolio progress, risks and escalations;
• Reduce time spent hunting for documents;
• Remove duplication of work.
• Visibility:
• Use Perform to track and visualise key milestones, the portfolio 'flight path' and 'arrivals board';
• Enable a clear and visual view of the portfolio of projects, their current status, and the 'back to green' actions for red and amber projects.

• Preparing Board Packs:
• Transform the time and effort to prepare Excel/PowerPoint packs with instantly generated, real time reports;
• Quickly escalate key insights to leadership on a "tell me what I need to know about" basis;
• Generate relevant and credible information to inform better engagement and decision making;
• Effective Portfolio Review meeting / Monthly Review Mgt Meeting.
• Different reports for different audiences:
• Design automated meeting slide packs in formats that drive the right agenda for those meetings and generate more valuable governance meeting outcomes;
• Create customised reports and meeting formats to tailor Perform outputs to the needs of key stakeholders.
• Project Maturity:
• Use Perform to enable an evolution to the next level of project maturity for the organisation. Primary focus on using Perform to enable a more proactive and agile organisation culture
• Need for instant impact
• With an executive board meeting coming up it was crucial that Perform could be set up, have accurate, relevant data, and be able to immediately produce configured reports specific to the meeting requirements.

The Way We Tackled The Solution

• Our lead Customer Solutions Consultant and Product Manager worked with the customer's team and began to tackle some of the problems almost immediately including:
• Initial system configuration to align with the environment is working in and the maturity of the organisation;
• Bulk upload of all users and viewers into Perform;
• Deliver User and Super User training and administer personalised manual's for future reference;
• Support User's use of Perform and assist with inputting of all projects, milestones, tasks, risks, issues etc.;

• During initial configuration sessions we spoke about the need for different reports to be tailored to different audiences and the time it took the PMO to manually create these different views.
• We therefore immediately configured 3 separate, tailored and automatically generated reports displaying different data for the 3 different audiences, Board of Executive, Board of Commissioners and Steering Group Meetings;
• We worked together to ensure bulk uploads of risks and issues went smoothly to enable Perform to immediately generate a single source of credible project insights and escalations.
• We created document links to key project documents in SharePoint so that Perform was enabled as a portal for all relevant information that leadership may want to access through a single source. 
• Meeting formats were configured and enabled so that governance meetings could immediately be run directly off Perform with no time lost hunting for documents.
• We held, and continue to hold, weekly 30 minute Perform Optimisation Calls with the PMO team to inject our Perform experience with the latest PMO challenges to optimise the use and value from Perform as the client's project maturity levels grow. 

The Results Of Our Combined Effort

• From purchase order to live instance configuration and ready to go live was complete in under 10 days;
• PMO no longer spends time on PowerPoint and Excel cutting and copying data to produce 3 separate reports. This on its own has generated significant time and effort savings, enabling PMO resources to focus on far more valuable work;

• Overcame challenges with COVID-19 to still successfully deploy Perform and help tailor it to the specific needs of client;
• The customer now has a credible single source of truth and repository for leadership;
• Meetings are now driven off automated, consistent formats which are designed to optimise meeting outcomes; 
• 3 different and customised Perform slide packs were ready to drive meetings, immediately. There is no limit to the number of customised and automated slide packs the customer can create based on the needs of the business and key stakeholders.

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