We’re managing a complex transformation program involving thousands of workflows across the world. How can we assure its success?
Our particular challenges:
- The program’s needs are changing faster than we can analyze the impact of each change
- We don’t understand how actions we take within the program affect on-going operations outside the program both now, and after the program is completed
- We have to make decisions today to avoid risks we can’t even see yet!
These were the challenges faced by the program governance team responsible for transforming an international bank’s legacy global communications infrastructure to a unified communications-as-a-service solution provided by Cisco. There were 10,000 locations in 53 countries to transform in three years, from ATM terminals to major high-rise office buildings. The program’s goal was to reduce the bank’s annual operating costs for communications services by hundreds of millions of dollars. It succeeded but not with data along – it needed a sophisticated decision intelligence solution from Quantellia.
As if this wasn’t challenging enough, simultaneous to the transformation project, the bank was also restructuring. Business units were being consolidated and non-core businesses were being divested. This meant that the already-challenging transformation program was constantly chasing a moving target. Plans that depended on a particular facility being transformed by a particular date routinely fell apart as that facility was marked for divestiture and removed from the program. Or a given region would need to fast-track videoconferencing, requiring that it be transformed to the new communications infrastructure months or years ahead of the original plan.
All this “in-flight change” required resources with very specific skills to be re-assigned; complex circuit provisioning processes had to be expedited on one day, then put on hiatus the next, so carefully planned transitions from existing communications providers to the new services had to be abandoned.
Existing project management tools were not equipped to handle the rate of change, nor the many external non-project related factors that had to be considered to keep up with the rapidly evolving environment.
All this was taking a toll on the program:
- The successful transformation rate (the percentage of sites successfully transformed by the planned date) was low.
- Each failed transformation introduced a ripple effect of new tasks, and required many completed tasks to be re-done. This made schedules more brittle, increasing the chances of further failures. An out-of-control chain reaction loomed.
- Rather than reducing operating expenses, the program had the effect of temporarily increasing Opex;
Using Quantellia’s DEEPMTM decision intelligence solution, the program management team was able to address these challenges and turn the program around to eventually exceed its return on investment targets.
The key benefits delivered by DEEPM that led to the bank’s success were:
“Over the horizon” risk assessment including real-time situational awareness
When DEEPM was installed, the program governance team, working with Quantellia, developed the rules that DEEPM would run that defined the following:
- Variables from both the project and the operating business units that DEEPM would monitor and/or include in its calculations.
- Conditions that had to be met for a task or sub-project to be successful.
- Conditions that put a task or sub-project at risk, along with a measure of that risk as low, medium or high.
These rules were continually run giving the management team a real-time validation and risk assessment dashboard for every task and sub-project they were tracking in DEEPM.
Automated program rules assurance
A second real-time dashboard was provided highlighting tasks or sub-projects that had failed a rules validation check, including conditions that indicated the actual program issue would occur in the future.
Integration of program decisions with business outcomes
DEEPM ran a forward model of likely operating expenses based on the current configuration of the project, assuring managers that their decisions did not undermine the primary goal of the program.
“What-if” change management simulator that minimizes change-related risks
One of the most powerful features of DEEPM is its dynamic re-scheduler. This allows schedule items to be moved using a simple drag-and-drop operation, which automatically calculated the downstream project impacts – not just on schedule but on ROI and other factors. As each item is moved, the rules and forward model are run in real time, allowing a user can visualize which decisions would increase risk or violate constraints, and which will lead to successful outcomes.
Optimization of outcomes while satisfying all program constraints
The team learned that DEEPMTM can optimize program variables to achieve specified goals. This can be provided as a cloud service that continually runs alternative scenarios through the DEEPMTM rules base, and searches for those that optimize the chosen criteria.
“DEEPMTM helped transform the management and governance of this program by:
- Assuring that project schedules satisfied all required constraints, both internally and across the program,
- Controlling risks; successful completions rose from about half to over 90%,
- Reducing the time taken to perform change impact analysis from weeks to seconds, making sure program decisions led to the desired goal of lowering operating costs.
As a result of our analysis, the transformation program completed on time, and exceeded its target improvement in operating costs by 30%.
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