Tom Freeman, CIO of the city of Roseville, Calif., has
reduced his $10 million budget by 6.8% just by using aproject and portfolio management
(PPM)application to align his department
with his city council's strategic goals and objectives. | | | | | We were overburdened with projects.
Tom Freeman
CIOcity of Roseville,
Calif. |
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"Roseville is one of those cities that have its own operations --
an electric department, planning, police, fire, transportation,"
Freeman said. "We have 16 different operating organisations. It's
somewhat difficult because it's almost like running 16 different
businesses. We were having a little bit of trouble with a silo
effect. One of our goals was to break down those silos and try to
align technology projects with the goals and objectives of the
city council. But to do that, everybody had to see the big picture
of what was going on."
"We were overburdened with projects," Freeman said. "If we had
on another major project, a PPM tool implemented in-house -- that
would have taken even more resources and we would have been
burdened with software licensing and additional equipment."
The key for Freeman, who uses on-demand PPM vendor
Innotas, was
getting visibility into the 180 projects his 40-person IT
organisation was working on for a city of 110,000 people. This
included both new projects and ongoing maintenance projects. He
extracted information on those
projects from spreadsheets and mapped them to his city
council's goals on a dashboard within his PPM application.
"We had to go through each of those [projects] and set them up
in the project portfolio scenario," Freeman said. "With that
process, we also indicated their alignment with city council's
goals. We reprioritised things. We saw some projects that were
unnecessary and some had a higher priority than they should have
and some needed more priority."
For instance, Freeman's organisation gave a higher priority to
public safety projects, such as mobile data enhancements for police
patrol cars and crime analysis applications that allowed the police
department to better understand patterns of crime and other
incidents in different geographic areas.
No projects were canceled, Freeman said. But those that had less
impact on the city council's goals were pushed down. Projects to
enhance existing core systems, for the parks and recreation
department for instance, were curtailed. Replacing the city's
financial management system was also delayed when the PPM
technology showed that enhancements to the system in some key
areas, particularly in how the city provided information to
residents, eased pressure for a major upgrade.
A wide-angle business lens
Ian Finley, research director at Boston-based AMR Research Inc.,
said PPM has the power to give organisations a combined view of
both new projects and maintenance work.
"It allows you to look at it and sort it based on priorities,
risks and opportunity," Finley said. "It's one of the few tools IT
has had to pull everything that is going on in IT in one place and
apply a business lens to that to try to come up with an answer to
the question, 'Is this project or particular fix more important
than that one?'"
Freeman said the budget savings he realised from using a PPM
tool came directly from the visibility he gained into new projects
and operations. That visibility allowed him to prioritise "projects
and have a better look at what we should and could do, rather than
having too big of an appetite for new projects. That's where the
portfolio came in."
PPM also helped Freeman better manage his staff resources. By
knowing exactly how much capacity his staff had, he didn't allow
his organisation to take on more than it could handle. This helped
avoid adding staff.
Finley said many companies use only project management
applications instead of PPM applications. This deprives them of
that big-picture view that Freeman discovered.
"They're probably using a project management tool that allows
them to look at individual projects but does not allow them to view
all projects from a systematic view," Finley said. "To get a bigger
view, they use Excel. They put it all in one big spreadsheet to
compare and see which ones are in trouble and which ones are going
well. On the operations side they're probably managing
[maintenance] on a help desk type application that allows them to
see all the incidents that are coming up and the scheduled, planned
work, but they won't be able to apply a business lens to it."
PPM allows CIOs to integrate new projects with maintenance,
Finley said.
"It allows you to see, if you take Joe and put him on fixing a
problem here, what impact that will have on new projects," Finley
said.
Freeman said PPM also allowed business units within city
government to break out of their individual silos and understand
how the projects they request affect the IT organisation's overall
ability to serve the city. In addition, he set up a technology
governance committee with representatives from each city
department. The committee uses the PPM technology to set
priorities.
"Departments can see the big picture," Freeman said. "Before, they
were siloed. The electric department would only see what was
important to them. Now departments can see what is in the best
interest of the city overall. We really didn't have good tools for
that before."
Finley said PPM is a big part of IT governance. It allows
business unit executives to better understand how their demands
affect the IT organisation and its capacity.
"If you've got 14 different departments who all think they're
the most important department in the world, how do you make
decisions about who goes first and who goes second and who gets
more resources," Finley said. "IT can't make that up. IT isn't
really the group who sets policy. It's a support function. You need
to be able to give tools to whoever runs the organisation to give
them visibility so they can see here are all the competing
priorities, and here are all the resources that we have."
Let us know what you think about the story; email:
Shamus McGillicuddy,
News Writer