Cisco Capital’s New Approach to Efficiency
Keeping a handle on project efficiency at a large financial institution is not easy. Not to mention having to accurately plan and assign resources so work gets done without wasting time and money. This is especially challenging for global institutions like Cisco Capital, which supports Cisco’s vast business and partner network and provides financing solutions across more than 100 countries.
In response to an increasingly complex and global landscape, Cisco Capital recognized that to fully enable profitable growth for its parent company Cisco Systems, Inc., it needed to improve how it managed important strategic initiatives, as well as several operational activities across the organization. The company turned to senior manager Aimee Shea and appointed her to lead its newly centralized PMO. She was tasked with streamlining the project management process and improving the organization’s project success rate.
Collaboration and Reporting Conundrum
Shea quickly realized in order to achieve this key objective, Cisco Capital had to overcome several project and program management-related challenges, including a legacy of achieving inconsistent results, limited visibility of overall project health and status and an inability to effectively manage cross-functional collaboration at a high level.
Moreover, the group was hindered by static, outdated project reports that were manually intensive to create, and still failed to drive informed decision-making. As Shea explains, “My team runs approximately 10 to 15 large initiatives at a time. Each team would send me emails, which I would then have to manually input to PowerPoint slides—a process that could take me up to six hours. But even then, it was a static snapshot, and by the time our executives got around to reading the email, the information was already out of date. There was also limited to no flexibility for creating customized views if an executive asked.”
Shea and her team agreed that Cisco Capital’s PMO, as well as its associated departments and divisions, needed a new technology-led framework for planning and executing; one that would fit how the organization wanted to manage projects and programs in a collaborative way.
Her group required a solution that was easy to use and capable of supporting the organization’s strategic execution process. It had to be suitable for multiple project types, as well as global and multi-phase programs and provide an integrated roadmap at the portfolio, program and project level. It also needed to provide real-time visibility and integrated views to enable better business decision-making at the executive level.
Choosing a Solution
Based on its challenges and requirements, Cisco Capital conducted a comprehensive exploration of various cloud-based solutions, and it also examined tools used by its parent company Cisco Systems, Inc.
After evaluating Clarizen, Shea and her group chose it as the solution for delivering the much-needed framework for planning and executing, and at the same time, it would seamlessly align with the collaborative manner in which the organization wanted to manage projects and programs. With the ability to provide centralized project views and cross-functional work streams, the new system would provide both the internal visibility to the PMO group and the external visibility to Cisco Systems to build a foundation of transparency and consistency across the enterprise.
This resulted in a flexible solution that was easy to customize to Cisco Capital’s specific needs, without major IT involvement. Says Shea: “We saw very quickly that this new solution had all of the robust capabilities we were looking for in an enterprise-level solution, and it was highly configurable to how we wanted to run our projects.” The low total cost of ownership was another important attribute for this financial services organization.
Cisco Capital began its implementation process by defining configuration requirements and establishing processes and templates. Full deployment was achieved within two months—a process that Shea feels was “very quick.”
Rapid adoption is facilitated by ease-of-use and library of accessible, intuitive learning tools and resources. Adds Shea: “We now have a reliable single source of truth for our project and program information.”
“It used to take four to six hours to create a project roadmap and it was often an outdated, static snapshot in time. We can now literally create a roadmap within one to two minutes, and it’s based on accurate and reliable real-time information.”
Executive Summary
Challenge. A newly centralized PMO needed a single source of truth into project health and status to yield a higher project success rate.
Results.
- 99% Reduction in time spent creating project roadmaps.
- Significantly improved collaboration across cross-functioning distributed teams.
- Improved executive visibility with real-time relevant health reports.
Discover how Clarizen can make difference for your team—start a free trial today at: http://mkt.clarizen.com/kmw1.