Pinnacle Helps AOL Select and Implement Enterprise Project Management and Portfolio Project Management Solutions

Client Situation

AOL was committed to adopting best practices for Enterprise Project Management and Portfolio Management for their technology group. AOL’s move to an Enterprise Project Management system was sponsored by AOL’s CTO John McKinley. One of the original business drivers was to support Finance’s goal to capitalize all eligible development work.

To gain expertise and adoption they decided to pilot the approach with one large technology group using a simplified Project Management approach and adding more capabilities as they could be adopted. Additional groups were brought on once the approach and results were proven.

AOL called upon Pinnacle to help them define and execute an iterative approach to gain acceptance and commitment at all levels of the AOL Technology division. Our challenge was to define and implement an effective Enterprise Project Management  process, supported by the Primavera P6 software, and to deploy the new process to the AOL Enterprise Project Management Office (EPMO) and to thousands of end users across three continents and eleven countries.

Pinnacle Approach

The product set selected was the Enterprise Project Management System based on the Primavera P6 product suite. Primavera P6 is AOL’s system of record for Project, Portfolio Management and Time Reporting.

For the implementation, Pinnacle started with a preliminary requirements analysis of AOL’s situation and readiness to adopt an Enterprise Project Management solution.  Based on our analysis, Pinnacle and the EPMO recommended a multi-pronged approach to reduce risk and ensure a successful implementation.

Several factors such as size (7,000 users) and geographical distribution of AOL’s development and service management organization influenced our approach. AOL and Pinnacle chose:

• An iterative roll-out strategy that could deal with evolving requirements.
• To layer in different levels of Project Management capabilities based on each groups’ ability and willingness to adopt new methods.
• To establish Steering Committees, Tiger Teams and Communications Plans to drive Adoption
• An Adoption measurement program to track the efficacy of the Implementations
• To build and deliver contextual training, integrating AOL Technology processes, roles  and tool techniques
• Integration of Primavera P6 into existing and new Corporate processes from Finance, Accounting, HR and Product Development.

The iterative roll-out strategy had the main Development functional groups deploying serially.  Once we had proven the value and the tactics for the roll-out methods we then rolled out to other groups in parallel.

The layers of different project management capabilities included:

• Simple project management, time reporting, and initial metrics dashboards, standard corporate SDLC
• More robust project management techniques;  addition of Resource Capacity Planning
• Focus on capitalization of software development activities; Agile methods added to the corporate SDLC
• Portfolio Management added with focus on Asset Management using Primavera P6 and Primavera Prosight
• Integration into Corporate level processes was implemented to support:
• New Product Introduction
• Finance and Investment strategies, such as Capitalization.
• HR processes for on-boarding new groups and individuals and to support outsourcing
• Primavera P6 integrated into AOL's Application Security infrastructure (LDAP) to automatically manage licenses as new employees joined or left
• Primavera P6 integrated with SAP using customized Impress middleware
• Resource Capacity Planning

Results Achieved

This implementation of Enterprise Project Management and Primavera P6 provided major bottom line contributions across AOL.  One group of 1200 users focused on Resource Portfolio Management saved 261,000 man hours for the first 2 quarters.  Finance and Accounting saw significant savings by increasing the amount of development Capitalized.

The AOL implementation is multi-national across 3 continents, 11 countries and covers all of the development and support resources for AOL.   The user community includes:

• 600 project managers
• 300 resource managers
• 4,700 time sheet users ( including designers, developers and quality assurance personnel)
• 1000+ time sheet users in service management
• 200+ executive users including finance, accounting, product management and functional management

Many different stakeholders are supported in this system.  Their considerations are  financial, time to market, cost savings, best practice for software project management and other competitive goals.  Stakeholders in the definition and execution of the Enterprise Project Management approach included:

• Finance and Accounting (for Technology and for Corporate Standards)
• Product Managers (Customer facing)
• Application Asset Portfolio team
• PMOs (Enterprise, Development, Back Office and others)
• Program Managers (Customer facing and Back office)
• Resource Managers (e.g. Development  Managers and Q.A. Managers)
• Project Managers (Customer facing and Back office)
• Information Technology
• SOX compliance and other corporate governance users

In addition to meeting the challenges of a complex cross cultural organization we also met the challenges of a large, distributed and complex Technology implementation.  AOLs Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Management implementation includes:

• More than 50 servers
• Client/server and web based components
• Citrix for international and some US users.
• Integration with security, HR (Peoplesoft), Accounting (SAP) and Enterprise Reporting

About AOL

AOL LLC (formerly America Online, Inc.) is an American global Internet services and media company operated by Time Warner. Founded in 1983 as Quantum Computer Services, it has franchised its services to companies in several nations around the world or set up international versions of its services.

AOL is perhaps best known for its online software suite, also called "AOL", that allowed millions of customers around the world to access the world's largest "walled garden" online community and eventually reach out to the internet as a whole. At one time AOL's membership was over 30 million members worldwide, most of whom accessed the AOL service through the AOL software suite.