Zions Bancorporation is one of USA’s premier financial services companies with total assets exceeding $65 billion. Zions operates under local management teams and distinct brands in 11 western states: Arizona, California, Colorado, Idaho, Nevada, New Mexico, Oregon, Texas, Utah, Washington and Wyoming.
The company is a national leader in Small Business Administration lending and public finance advisory services, and is a consistent top recipient of Greenwich Excellence awards in banking. In addition, Zions is included in the S&P 500 and NASDAQ Financial 100 indices.
Zions Bancorporation chose Tempus Resource to:
With affiliate branches of Zions Bancorporation stretching from Texas to Washington State, managing projects and people across the country was proving a challenge for Lloyd Norman, Senior Planning and Delivery Services Manager at Zions. Project delivery efforts were routinely being delayed due to resource constraints—40% of projects were delayed by two months or more—which led Lloyd and his team to look for a more holistic view regarding project planning and delivery.
The challenge Lloyd and the project management office (PMO) faced did not concern project financials, but availability, as Lloyd explains: “We had always done a good job of getting the financials ready for projects, but we assumed unlimited resources while doing so. We would perform high-level estimates, role by role, of what it would take to rollout projects. But we always assumed the availability could be figured out while the project was underway. This almost immediately led to resource conflicts. On larger projects we might be in resource arbitration discussions with 25 to 30 different cross-functional managers, each trying to provide project resources. It’s easy to understand how confusing this can be.”
Lloyd and his team had a PPM tool in place for resource management, but this was largely ineffectual from a resource planning perspective. The platform didn’t offer data entry—one of the biggest facets to resource planning.
To solve this, Zions needed a more effective and holistic approach to resource planning. This started with a ‘clean slate’: building effective resource planning from the ground up would mean improving our processes and finding a product, as Lloyd explains: “We were looking for solutions on the market that could help get a handle on resource planning. The paradigm was, while we knew a PPM tool would limit us in terms of resource planning, it also seemed the most likely solution because that’s where the development is happening. When I came across Tempus Resource, I realized it wasn’t a PPM tool, but it can interface with them. It fits an interesting niche for companies with internal, cross-functional resources which was very well-received by me. And it soon became clear that Tempus Resource would be a very viable solution for us.”
Zions Bancorporation started with a proof of concept (POC) for Tempus Resource before fully implementing the tool. Even with a small initial sample size, Lloyd saw immediate benefits: “By coincidence, the POC was deployed in the middle of our roadmap planning for 2018, where the PMO starts with 140 projects and must condense that down, from a budget perspective, to something more palatable to the CFO.”
To solve this, Lloyd had to consider what projects could be staffed right away. Without the need for prior training, projects and resources were added into Tempus Resource’s resource pool, uncovering which projects could realistically be started in 2018.
Lloyd showed this to the CFO, and re-aligned the budget estimations with the reality of projects that could be completed in the coming year. This served as clear confirmation of the potential of the Tempus Resource initiative, and led Zions Bancorporation to close the deal with ProSymmetry. Lloyd is now focused on rolling the tool out to the enterprise.
Lloyd expresses an emphasis on design and the UI has helped drive adoption of Tempus Resource: “It’s designed to be used by resource managers, but it’s also highly consumable by project and program managers. For example, our project managers do a month-long reconciliation on their projects, both financial and resource-centric. While they’re doing that, they’re going into Tempus and making sure resource allocation, which is performed by the resource managers, is sufficient for their needs. They’ve never done that before. It’s really a lifecycle tool and the interface has helped us exploit it in that way.”
Since the success of the POC, Lloyd’s goal is rolling out Tempus Resource to the entire technology operations enterprise as their sole resource capacity planning tool. “We’ve got all our PMs, business analysts, and specific development test resources in Tempus, and we’re still growing it now. We have a rollout path in place that will take us through 2018 and onwards. We’re adapting the rollout process for different departments, as some are using spreadsheets, some SharePoint Sites, and some are still using physical whiteboards. So, it’s taking different amounts of time to get people up to speed with how Tempus works. But rollout has been an obvious decision—none of the PPM tools we were evaluating have the capabilities of 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.
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