Challenge

A well-respected, publicly traded national insurance provider that offers personal home and auto, business, and life insurance was struggling with its prior resource management platform’s inability to help them conduct proper analysis due to lacking reporting features. Brian, the insurer’s IT (Information Technology) Resource Manager, knew that his team of more than 1,500 employees needed a more robust platform to help facilitate resource capacity management. His team also needed a solution to help plan the hundreds of projects they manage, facilitate career development, and hiring decisions. As a Resource Management Certified Professional© who completed professional certification for resource managers with The Resource Management Institute, Brian recognized the need for a quicker resource management solution that was easier to use and could help them manage a growing department and numerous resource managers.

Solution

When selecting a new resource management platform, ease of use, reporting capabilities, and speed were essential to the insurer. After evaluating multiple platforms, they selected Tempus Resource by ProSymmetry. Tempus is a purpose-built, resource portfolio management solution providing many Fortune 500 companies with resource forecasting and capacity planning solutions to help make strategic decisions for their businesses. With capabilities including bulk resource forecasting, skills and talent management, portfolio and resource capacity reporting and interactive scenario planning and WhatIf analysis, Tempus gives organizations actionable intelligence, cutting-edge analytics, and real-time scenario analysis.

Tempus has upgraded resource capacity and future planning and staffing decisions for Brian’s IT team. The team utilizes Tempus to capture associates’ time and capacity, which helps with their capacity planning, utilization, and allocation of current projects. Tempus has also assisted the IT team with future project scheduling, as some of the IT team’s planning takes place six months or more in advance.

Benefit

Tempus Timesheets have improved the IT team’s capacity planning. As more than 1,000 associates are required to input their time on a weekly basis into several hundred projects across the business, it helps IT leadership run reports to look at utilization and better manage expectations with both internal and external projects. When project managers approach IT leadership to request resources, Brian explains that Tempus is able to facilitate the approval process, which incorporates the project managers, service managers, and all involved with that resource to make sure that the requested associate has the ability and bandwidth to do the requested work.

Tempus Timesheets also assists IT leadership when examining current and planned work. Brian explains, “Tempus has given us a better look at what we really are doing, and a better look at what our associates’ real capacity is. We are focused on getting the right resource in the right place, and Tempus has certainly helped us facilitate that.” Brian believes the adage ‘you get out what you put in,’ so the IT team hones its efforts to ensure associates are entering their time into Tempus Timesheets and doing the timesheets accurately. Resulting from the more accurate analysis Tempus provides with this additional data, Brian and IT leadership have been able to discover opportunities within his team. “Some of the a-ha moments have been, ‘Wow, we really have time cycles to do additional work.’ Or the other side, we see, ‘Wow, we’ve got a few people who are consistently overworked in a department where others have time to do more.’” When project managers approach IT leadership with a request for a specific associate, Tempus enables IT to see which associates have a heavier workload and identify under-utilized associates for the work. Brian continues, “Tempus has allowed us to look at demand planning resources to determine what resources are available for a project request and spread the load differently among our teams.”

Tempus Timesheets have also assisted the insurer’s IT team with career advancement. The analysis that Timesheets provides helps IT leadership give exposure to associates who have not had an opportunity to do a particular type of work before. When a project manager requests an expert in a particular area, IT can use skills built into Tempus Timesheets to differentiate between associates who have experience on the commercial development side versus someone with experience only on the personal lines side.

Results

Tempus aids the insurer’s IT leadership to hold associates accountable for properly recording their time, as it impacts workflow and workload for the entire team. Brian explains, “Ultimately what we want to know is what an associate’s capacity is, did we properly allocate that person, and were they allocated and then used properly. Tempus analysis lets us know if we are right-sizing requested allocation with actuals. We might have a project manager say they need 30% of a resource’s time but then they are only giving the resource time to do 15% of their time in work. We use Tempus to facilitate availability for future planning.”

Switching to Tempus has streamlined the IT team’s processes and made obtaining data for decision making quicker and easier. “The second I saw Tempus in action, our purchase and implementation was done on ease of use,” describes Brian. “The configuration of Tempus is so custom that we can do exactly what we want to do and how we want to do it. What we struggled with in our previous tool the most was reporting. Tempus’s standard reporting is very easy to configure. For anyone who knows Excel and has ever used a pivot table, creating those reports and getting data out quickly and on demand was amazing to us. Reporting was something we really didn’t have with our prior tool; it was very difficult to do. The reporting that we had in the other tool took a lot of effort and hours of research and planning to create a report. Tempus allowed us to create a lot of our standard reports. We were able to create and implement reports before the end of our implementation project, and it was very much about ease of use that made our decision to implement Tempus.”

In addition to gaining speed in their analysis and ease of use, the insurer’s IT team has appreciated ProSymmetry’s commitment to customer success. “I couldn’t have added and picked people to service us better,” describes Brian. “They treat us with kindness and respect, and we all feel that when we discuss our experience with Tempus, the ProSymmetry Customer Success team takes it to heart. It has been a great pleasure to work with the ProSymmetry team. We feel like a valued customer, and they make us feel that our opinions count.” As the company introduces more departments, teams, and processes to run in an agile environment, Tempus is able to help the company with its implementation. Brian details, “We used to be a predominantly waterfall company, and agile has changed the way we do business. We are working through the process with Tempus to adjust the way we do things in an agile environment. When different directors change the way they want to manage people’s time, we have flexibility to do that with how things are configured and what we do with Tempus.”

When the insurance provider is impacted by changing market conditions, Tempus helps them stay on track. Brian says, “Tempus has allowed us to maintain the ability to properly plan projects. As people leave, if we have backfill, we can put them on a project. If we don’t, we can see very quickly how that change impacts projects using what if scenarios. It does allow us to better protect our workload. Tempus has helped us stay on track in a market of ever-changing employment.”

What is Tempus Resource?

Named Gartner Cool Vendor 2016, Tempus Resource is a real-time resource management software that uses powerful ‘What-if’ simulations to model project data. It helps organizations of any size, of any level of project management maturity, to make risk-free, data-driven resource decisions.

Contact ProSymmetry for a free Tempus Resource trial or demo.