Jupiter Asset Management Reimagines Project & Portfolio Management with Microsoft and Wellingtone
Overview
Industry
Financial Services
Country
London
Challenge
To centralise information and standardise project management delivery to deliver business change
Solution
Microsoft Project Online
Products and Services
Project Online, SharePoint, Teams, Office 365
Results
A single source of the truth, greater visibility through reporting and efficient project delivery
Benefits
- One Source of Truth | Jupiter has consolidated all data into a single cloud platform, with reduced data duplication, to feed all ongoing project management activity.
- Automated Reporting | PowerBI delivers detailed reporting from portfolio to project level, fuelling strategic decision making.
- Improved Efficiency | Standardised project templates and workflows together with easy information access through team channels delivers time and cost efficiencies that frees-up the team to work on value-add activities which contribute to business growth
- Forecasting Accuracy | Jupiter is able to accurately forecast and forward plan resources management requirements and project costs.
- Proactive optimisation | With a single portfolio view and trend forecasting, Jupiter is able to start selecting the right mix of projects to meet corporate goals.
Growing Capability Challenges
Jupiter’s PMO, part of its change management function, delivers over 20 business and technology change projects at any one time, working collaboratively with teams across the business to achieve ongoing transformation. Its varied portfolio stretches from regulatory compliance projects, through to strategic, long-term programmes that enable total business growth.
Jupiter’s legacy PPM tool had slowly become unfit for purpose, leaving project managers seeking the additional functionality they needed in standalone tools. This resulted in a disjointed manual approach, duplication of data, and onerous reporting and governance processes. Accessing the right information to compile senior management reports was difficult and often resulted in inefficient repetition of effort. Data was stored in multiple places leaving the PMO team without at a single source of truth, and a growing sense of mistrust in its data quality.
Nikki Stobie, Head of PMO says: «The biggest challenge we faced was that we couldn’t easily access and pull together the information needed to present with confidence to senior management. In the PMO team everything we do is about delivering transformation, and this was proving a significant barrier to delivering the proactive change management we aspired to.»
«Overall the implementation of Project Online has delivered a golden source of project information and streamlined our reporting process which has resulted in higher quality project reporting.»
Nikki Stobie – Head of PMO, Jupiter Asset Management
A Partnership for Success
Needing to achieve one central source of information, and cutting-edge project management capability, Jupiter reviewed the PPM solutions in market. Convinced by the power of the cloud, it chose Microsoft Project Online, and specialist implementation partner Wellingtone. Wellingtone came highly recommended by Microsoft, and Jupiter were quickly convinced of their ability to deliver against the brief provided.
«We’d looked at other Microsoft partners, but Wellingtone seemed like just the right fit for us. This assumption was quickly proven to be correct. They know the product inside out and are clearly specialists in project management,» says Nikki Stobie.
She continues: «Wellingtone is a powerful implementation partner, from the initial 2-day scoping session through to project completion they supported us every step of the way. They fostered strong communication and a no-nonsense approach, encouraging us not to over complicate things whilst always ensuring we received the greatest possible benefit from Project Online. They also provided invaluable wrap around training and exceeded our expectations by completing the implementation in just 4 months.»
«We had data trapped in pockets before and we’ve now moved to a place where everything is centralised, and we can trust the integrity of the data. Not only does that make our decision making faster it takes away the duplication of effort manual correlation tasks we had before.»
Nikki Stobie – Head of PMO, Jupiter Asset Management
One Visible Source of the Truth
Project Online has provided the PMO with a single shared platform for all project management activity. Dynamic integrations with SharePoint, Teams and PowerBI provide collaborative project hubs for centralised information and powerful, readily available reporting. Every Project Hub has a standardised structure enabling access to project information including the project document repository, Project Online Site – for status and RAIDs – and Project Schedule.
The greater visibility achieved through this consolidation, makes it easier for the PMO team to actively respond to key milestones, risks and issues at every stage of each project lifecycle. Cumbersome, manual processes have now been replaced by streamlined working practices, which notably improve the efficiency and quality of project management.
«Project Online has given us that golden source of project information. All projects are managed through the tool, and all the documentation is housed within Teams. It’s completely streamlined our working processes and has resulted in vastly improved project delivery.» Says Nikki Stobie.
«As Head of PMO, I can look at the portfolio view and go down into individual projects. We’ve so much more information at our fingertips. I can see which vendors are working on projects, how much has been spent to date and how much is forecasted for the rest of the year in seconds.»
Nikki Stobie – Head of PMO, Jupiter Asset Management
Insights-led Reporting
Jupiter now have access to centralised, trustworthy data, and are reaping the benefits of next-generation, real-time project and portfolio reporting. Driving one of the most notable areas of transformation, Power BI provides real-time insights that span from the top-level portfolio view right down to granular level individual project line activity. The PMO benefits from a readily available suite of reports showing project and portfolio view of status, achievements and risks, together with an outlook of what’s planned for the coming period. The team can now baseline all projects and schedules and effortlessly compare how projects are performing against predictions, take fast remedial action where required, and forecast ahead.
As well as company-wide weekly reporting, the PMO has been able to develop custom dashboard views for different areas of the business. Furthermore, Jupiter adopted Wellingtone’s ReportALL solution, to enable them to additionally surface custom list data from the Projects Sites within Power BI.
Pinak Saikia, Jupiter PMO Analyst, says: «The transformation of our reporting capability is probably the most vital benefit we’ve realised from Project Online. We no longer have to keep manipulating data to arrive at the view we need, and we can drill up and down as required. The insights we get from this are making a tangible difference to our day-to-day decision making.»
«We use PowerBi to produce the fortnightly status report for the senior leadership team. As a next step we’re rolling out PowerBI across the business which will enable us to create additional customised views for different groups and people will be able to self-serve the information they need.»
Nikki Stobie – Head of PMO, Jupiter Asset Management
Resource Management Reimagined
Resource forecasting and management have also been transformed thanks to Project Online. Resource demand and associated costs are detailed within every project and rolled-up into a centralised Power BI report. At any given time, Jupiter can see where resource is currently allocated and plan where to deploy it next. Drill-down reporting enables the PMO to forecast demand across the portfolio, as well as manage individual project headcount levels to ensure time is used efficiently, and demand management needs are always met.
With access to powerful information literally at the touch of a button, the PMO is equipped to make proactive decisions on where to place resource for maximum efficiency, mitigate risks associated with inefficient allocations, and analyse forecasts against agreed project budgets.
«It’s really like night and day. With Project Online we’ve greater visibility into change resource utilisation and availability which means we can make decisions daily on where resource needs to be allocated to meet demand. Advanced reporting enables us to forward plan in a way that simply wasn’t possible before,» says Pinak Saikia.
«The tool has really helped us to deliver projects more efficiently and be able to take on value-added activities. The contribution my team makes is now much more visible across the business.»
Nikki Stobie – Head of PMO, Jupiter Asset Management
Efficiency Gains Drive Excellence
Having previously grappled with non-standardised working practices, Project Online has enabled Jupiter to create standardised project templates. Project managers now benefit from having defined templates built around governance requirements which ensure best-in-class project delivery. Likewise, the management team can effortlessly RAG rate and monitor project key milestones.
Cross-company collaboration is also flourishing. Integration with Teams and Power BI has opened up new potential to foster a partnership mentality across the business, empowering greater data sharing and collaboration across stakeholder teams.
Enhanced efficiency and collaboration is driving time and cost savings, this in turn is enabling the PMO to perform additional value-added activities with the same resources, whilst raising the profile of the team around the business.
«I definitely feel like Project Online has enabled us to increase the value we deliver to the business. We’ve saved time with reporting through Power BI, we’ve more control over data, and we’re increasingly able to deliver innovative new initiatives,» says Nikki Stobie.
«Wellingtone provided really good information and guidance scoping out our requirements and designing the solution. They encouraged us to keep it simple and not over complicate the solution in order to get the benefit out of it – and they were right! We’ve got a tool that’s easy to use, and a central source of information that gives us everything we need to improve visibility of the portfolio and deliver the management reporting we need.»
Nikki Stobie – Head of PMO, Jupiter Asset Management
Proactive Portfolio Management
Jupiter has moved from having disparate information and a lack of visibility, to a business where portfolio review and optimisation are now possible. With risk and issue information accessible, the business can monitor trends across the portfolio, consider where projects should be prioritised to deliver the most benefit against corporate goals, and understand the opportunity costs associated with selecting one set of projects over another.
Project Online has proven to be the robust, future-proof platform Jupiter need to take its business aspirations forward. With an ongoing cycle of feature improvements and new functionality to take advantage of, Jupiter is already looking to the next stage of development in its cloud PPM capability. The first stage of this continued development journey will be working with Wellingtone to integrate Project Online’s Roadmap feature for yet deeper portfolio optimisation.
«Everything we do is about change. Having trustworthy data in one place, coupled with powerful reporting and streamlined ways of working, means we’re perfectly set-up to make the right strategic decisions about the future of our change portfolio.»
«Wellingtone have been instrumental in this transformation, with their guidance, support, training and the sharing of their knowledge they’ve empowered us to be self-sufficient and take control. It’s been a genuinely positive experience and genuinely collaborative partnership» concludes Nikki Stobie.
«Having Wellingtone support the Project Online implementation was definitely a real benefit. I praise them for their strong communication, help and support and I can’t fault them for anything – they’ve been fantastic! They’ve made our journey to Microsoft Project Online a successful one. They’ve been brilliant.»
Nikki Stobie – Head of PMO, Jupiter Asset Management
