Modernize Operations for Fortune 500 Media Company

The Challenge:

The PMOLink Team has a significant amount of experience in planning, managing, monitoring and controlling multi-year, multi-million dollar projects.  PMOLink was engaged by the client, a large (Fortune 500) media company, to help them establish a Program Management Office for a multi-year modernization effort.

This modernization effort involved

  • Building an automated factory to replace two older factories,
  • Retooling of information technology for the organization,
  • Establishing a PMO leveraging a project management application tool set, and
  • Implementation of a process management redesign for IT and financial systems and Personnel.

The new factory, systems and staffing successfully came on line on time. This multi-year portfolio of projects involved hundreds of millions of dollars and numerous organizations all over the world.  PMOLink is referred to as a “partner” in the success of these efforts by our customer.  PMOLink is still working with this client and its PMO organization to support new initiatives going forward.

The media company identified 214 projects as candidates to be included into their project portfolio. Preliminary analysis, business cases, and resource allocation estimates were provided by project owners and business sponsors. The PMO, acting as the central point of contact, was overwhelmed with the level of detail and, when faced with a need to organize this work, was uncertain which course of action would be the fastest and most efficient for the business.

Action Taken:

PMOLink, using advanced decision support technology, worked with the CEO and his senior leadership team to prioritize all 214 projects in a single day. The results were analyzed and a recommendation was made to group the projects into strategic initiatives and reduce the overall number through functional consolidation. The results was a much more manageable portfolio of 45 major projects divided into 10 strategic initiative programs aligned with business goals. This first step in the creation of an executable work program for the year was followed by a set of program planning workshops and deliverable definition meetings. All stakeholders were involved and the entire set of meetings was facilitated by highly experienced PMOLink senior portfolio managers.

Results:

An ordered list of projects, grouped by portfolio was achieved in 70 workdays. This list was detailed and included the deliverables, dependencies, and staffing estimates of all 45 projects, the relationship of the deliverables to the needs of the business, and the priority of each of the 45 projects. Under PMOLink guidance, processes for managing the projects, reporting progress, and integrating changes was instituted as formal methods. Once the planning was complete and the support processes had been installed, the Valpak team, using internal project management resources was able to move the program forward and begin to realize the benefits that each project identified. In a presentation of the completed portfolio to the Leadership Team, PMOLink demonstrated how the tactical plans, strategic targets and process implementation tied all the work streams together and allowed the organization to sharpen their focus on the work that would yield critical business results. In that final review, the leaders of the business left with results that would not have been achieved without PMOLink expertise, specifically:

  • Approved projects in the portfolio that are authorized to proceed (a baseline)
  • Actions to be taken to adjust project schedules based on resource loading
  • Process for managing scope and initiating programs and projects
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