Challenge

Sierra Nevada Corporation (SNC) is a leader in innovative, advanced technology solutions and open architecture integrations in aerospace and national security. SNC creates customized solutions in aviation, national security space, electronic warfare, command and control, mission systems, and inline cybersecurity. The company, with more than 5,000 employees worldwide, needed a solution to help manage projects and employees across multiple business units including engineering, IT, and program management. SNC also had to ensure employees’ time was being allocated properly to keep pace with various projects, including government contracts (“programs”) with firm deadlines. Most of their analysis was managed with spreadsheets, which proved to be very cumbersome and difficult to maintain. SNC leaders knew this was ineffective and started searching for a solution that could provide them with information needed at an enterprise level.

Because SNC’s work involves sophisticated endeavors with necessary skillsets required from their engineers, it was crucial that SNC’s leadership have a platform to help them plan many months in advance for multiple programs and demands for highly skilled employees, rather than relying on bringing in contractors on short notice to fill gaps.

Solution

SNC took a unique approach to finding the right platform to help them with resource management and capacity planning. Based on their desire to have better portfolio views of resource allocation and demands in a more cohesive format than many spreadsheets, they created a prototype for their vision of what could be possible for resource management. The mockup was intended to be a simplified view of how to manage resources. SNC leaders used the mockup as a template to show vendors what they wanted. After evaluating multiple platforms, they chose Tempus Resource. Tempus Resource by ProSymmetry 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. Tempus gives PMO leadership actionable intelligence, cutting-edge analytics, and real-time scenario analysis.

Tempus has elevated the way SNC monitors and reports on their resource capacity demands. They use Tempus to have a one-stop location by which various programs can present their needs going forward and match them up with the resources that the company has available from both engineering and IT. Joe Maguire, Director of Engineering for Systems and Specialty Engineering for Mission Solutions and Technologies at SNC, explains, “We use Tempus to provide that picture of what our employees are doing and use that to examine projections that we’ll need for staffing going forward. We are trying to optimize the utilization of our employees across programs.” Their goal with implementing Tempus is to enable programs to come to the table with what their needs are for staffing requirements, and Tempus can help make sure they have adequate resources to meet those needs.

Benefit

SNC’s engineering team has seen multiple benefits since transitioning away from relying solely on spreadsheets, which involved much more time to do manual analyses. By using a hybrid approach with actual and planned data with Tempus’s reporting capabilities, they can conduct their analyses more effectively. Tempus reporting is helping the team make sure they are meshing up personnel with the program needs. It helps them determine if staffing levels are adequate and make decisions on whether to hire more people or try to get additional help from other business areas or business units within the company. Maguire elaborates, “As we are a very lean organization, our expectation is that our folks are busy on direct programs and we want to maximize that capability. Tempus allows me to assemble teams for projects three to six months ahead to make sure we are meeting the staffing needs for programs as efficiently as possible.”

In addition to SNC’s engineering team, SNC’s IT department has been simultaneously implementing Tempus within their business unit and benefitting as well. SNC IT uses Tempus to manage allocations to programs and projects. Jeff Paris, Senior IT Project Manager for SNC, says, “The way IT is using Tempus is more from a prioritization standpoint, in terms of annual project planning and prioritizing those projects. Tempus helps us establish a cut line around what the IT department can and can’t cover from a resource perspective. Typically, IT gets more projects than can be handled. Tempus allows IT leadership to access how much of the work that’s coming to IT can be accomplished in a given time period.”

Before implementing Tempus, his team would often accept incoming requests without much analysis, only to determine at a later point that it was unfeasible because they didn’t have the resources to complete the request. Now with Tempus, they are able to identify up front how far down a project list they can get, where their cut line is, and what they will be working on for a given year. Paris continues, “Tempus allows us to manage our resourcing and the work that is getting done at a higher level.”

While IT uses Tempus to help determine future allocation, the engineering team uses Tempus in a more reactionary way, due to the nature of government contracts and new programs. When program leaders approach engineering with an upcoming program starting in three months with a certain number of engineers needed, engineering relies on Tempus to find those resources to keep the program on track. With a larger engineering staff, SNC’s engineering leaders can reach across business units to find the people needed for a particular program.

Tempus allows SNC leaders to make more gradual changes to staffing levels. Maguire elaborates, “There are always times in any organization when people are very busy and it’s crunch time, with a big project you need to work on. We have to temper that against the fact that, in six to nine months, that project will be over. I’d much rather be in a situation where people are very busy right now with the understanding that six to nine months down the road, we won’t be faced with layoffs because we spooled up a lot of additional resources that we didn’t have a longer term need for.”

Tempus has also enabled SNC to take a more strategic and holistic look at its resource management needs on an enterprise-wide level. Paris explains that one of the reasons SNC chose to implement Tempus in March 2020 was the platform’s ability to look across the organization at available resources outside of a specific business unit or business area. “With Tempus, we can say, ‘We’re going to need certain engineers with these skillsets for this upcoming program.’ Instead of the knee-jerk response to hire a contractor, we can look across the company and see that a particular engineer has that skillset and will be available during that time, so we can request that person as a resource. That alleviates us from having to spin up needless job requests and bring in additional resourcing when we don’t have to.”

SNC leaders use Tempus to balance resources, especially at a more macro level. They are able to examine several months of utilization by comparing current staffing levels to what the needs of the programs are.

Results

Tempus is enabling SNC to have a portfolio view of the company they weren’t able to achieve with spreadsheets from individual business units. Paris says, “The value that Tempus provides is the ability to have these views of labor allocations and demand at a portfolio level, rolled up across our different business areas and business units. Prior to us having the Tempus platform, it wasn’t as easily done, and it was done offline and siloed, and it was hard to roll together individual programs.”

Having that portfolio view of the organization, SNC’s engineering team has been able to take a macro look at their staffing demands and what they have in terms of supply. Maguire says, “Tempus gives us more f lexibility to know whether we need to hire, get support from other programs, or support other programs with our staff who have additional capacity to share.”

Tempus has also facilitated how SNC leaders gather information for reporting. The platform affords leaders like Maguire with a single location to see both the demand side and supply side of their resource management profile and store all of that information in one place. Forecasting has become much easier with Tempus, as it helps leaders like Paris better forecast IT’s needs three to six months in advance.

SNC’s implementation of a resource management solution has benefited from Tempus’s Customer Success team. “The responsiveness, interaction, and care that we get from ProSymmetry is really top-notch,” explains Paris. “I feel like we don’t have to go to a queue to wait for a response that takes 24 to 48 hours and it’s through an automated customer care system. I can reach out to the ProSymmetry team and I get a response quickly from the people who can answer my question right away.”

The SNC team feels supported by ProSymmetry’s commitment to helping customers achieve success. Paris continues, “From Day 1, ProSymmetry’s Customer Success team has been extremely good and caring. They are genuinely interested in solving our problems or helping us with our questions. They want to provide a good product that is working for us, and they have gone the extra mile on certain occasions to help build out the Tempus platform for us so it will work for our needs. I’ve been extremely grateful for the team at ProSymmetry for the care they have provided Sierra Nevada Corporation.”

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.