Reducing project cycle time by 62% and project manager turnover by 26% by modernizing a PMO for a multinational digital communications company.
SITUATION
Our client leads an innovation and automation team that focuses on developing and launching internal tools that drive operational efficiencies back into the organization. This team was experiencing issues with turnover among their project managers which disrupted innovation delivery. Additionally, the team was experiencing increased demand for new innovations that required additional project management support. Ultimately, the client struggled to effectively manage the daily activities and oversight of the project management team while enhancing their focus on additional strategic initiatives. To remedy this, our client sought a partner who could implement and execute a managed service engagement model for project management and release management services that would provide thought leadership, streamlined processes, and consistent project execution practices.
"[Apex's Solution Director] goes above and beyond every day; she is so outstanding that we now have her incorporated as a part of our management team." – Client POC
Our PMO Lead, an Internal Practice Consultant, began the project with an assessment of the current structure which resulted in a recommended roadmap for improving the overall PMO structure. In the next phase, we onboarded three project managers and four release managers to replace underperforming team members from other vendors. To ensure continuity for all our consultants and the remaining project managers from other vendors, we developed a training curriculum and materials. We adapted our resourcing allocation strategy to support changing business needs as our roles within client projects evolved. Our team created a standard operating playbook, complete with tools, templates, and artifacts, to ensure consistency in project management practices. Our team established a Community of Practice - a forum that encourages driving best practices, collaborative learning, and continuous improvement, improving our overall PMO maturity. We also created a release management process that enabled stakeholders to have better visibility of innovations created by the team and increased user adoption. We further expanded the team by onboarding a technical writer to develop user guides for newly developed tools, ensuring success when these innovations deploy to the broader client organization.
RESULT
Our team drove the completion of 15 innovation projects in nine months. We reduced project cycle time by 62% and reduced project manager turnover by 26%. Our release managers supported 34 releases across nine client-specific projects in under five months. Different client projects have had outcomes such as 80% market adoption, time savings of five min per case, and over $1,000,000 in cost savings. Our client cites our flexibility and responsiveness to feedback as a key element of our partnership and has provided frequent praise of our PMO team members.
