Fleet Credit Card Services Deploys EPM Solution - Improves IT Efficiency and Alignment

Client Situation

Fleet Credit Card Services had limited visibility into performance and progress across their portfolio of more than 450 IT projects. More importantly, they were unsure of where their 270 IT resources were spending their time and if they were aligned with the strategic goals of the business.

Pinnacle was asked by the CIO, Dennis Babcock, to help create a business case for change, resulting in a tangible and quantifiable business plan. We focused on the following areas:

• Time to market
  • Loss of market share
  • Loss of revenue
• Reduce Non Value Activities
• Improve productivity
  • cost of overtime
  • cost of contractors
• Risk reduction
  • Cost of firefighting
  • Cost of failed projects
• Improve decision making
• Cost of over committing resources
  • Staff burnout & attrition

As a result of business case approval, Pinnacle was asked to develop an implementation plan to address senior management's stated objectives:

• be able to make better informed business decisions
• obtain greater visibility into and track the projects that are my responsibility
• know better where we are relative to schedule, cost accounting and resource loading and availability
• understand current/future capacity to take on new work
• know what my resources are working on
• reduce the chaotic re-prioritization of work and its negative effects
• improve our ability to “do more with less"
• reduce non-value added projects and work

Pinnacle Approach

Pinnacle performed a ‘snapshot assessment’ of current practices and processes and provided recommendations on how to blend current initiatives with the implementation of enterprise project management.

Pinnacle found a number of appropriate practices and intensive activities that were addressing some of information and management requirements. In addition, Pinnacle found at least three project management databases that needed to be updated regularly and involved duplication of effort, to provide any useful project management information.

The implementation plan was to start simple, educating the team and evolving towards more robust systems and processes. Some of the initial activities included:

• Implementing a continuing educating and training program for staff in project management practices.
• Deploying a standard project management methodology.
• Developing and making available on-line a set of simple checklists, standard deliverables, project milestones and general project templates and “worked examples”.
• Building public “project board(s)” that presents all current projects, priorities, and key delivery dates for entire organization and work groups.
• Improving the Project initiation and ROI processes.
• Improving the integrity of project management data.
• Providing project management reports with empirical and tangible information.
• Replacing the existing time reporting system and reducing the islands of project information across the organization.

Pinnacle also recommended a three phase approach to implementing the Primavera enterprise project management tool suite:

• Implement a timesheet system.
• Evolutionary deployment of robust project management capabilities.
• Design and develop key system Interfaces between Primavera and other management information systems.

Results Achieved

In a very short space of time Fleet was able to realize the following benefits:

• After 5 weeks, 97% compliance to timesheet entry was achieved,  giving valuable insight and empirical evidence as to where effort was being spent.
• This immediately allowed more informed decisions to be made regarding project alignment to strategy and headcount allocation, specifically, relocating staff between departments.
• Resource contention reports have helped reduce non-project effort by 50%.
• Improved alignment of resources to projects improving overall project delivery by 40%.
• IT maintenance for legacy systems was reduced by 35% in year one alone.

Since initial deployment, Fleet have increased productivity year on year by reducing non-value added activities within the organization. Denis Babcock adds “at Pinnacle’s recommendation, the emphasis on people equally with process and the enterprise tool led to a swifter and more successful overall implementation.”  

About Bank of America

Bank of America (NYSE: BAC) is one of the world's largest financial institutions, serving individual consumers, small and middle market businesses and large corporations with a full range of banking, investing, asset management and other financial products and services. The company's Global Corporate and Investment Banking group (GCIB) focuses on companies with annual revenues of more than $2.5 million; middle-market and large corporations; institutional investors; financial institutions; and government entities. GCIB provides innovative services in M&A, equity and debt capital raising, lending, trading, risk management, treasury management and research. Bank of America serves clients in 175 countries and has relationships with 98 percent of the U.S. Fortune 500 companies and 79 percent of the Global Fortune 500. Many of the bank's services to corporate and institutional clients are provided through its U.S. and UK subsidiaries, Banc of America Securities LLC and Banc of America Securities Limited. For additional information, visit http://www.bankofamerica.com/.