Tempus Resource 2020 Virtual Conference Recap: Marc Neckermann, Valkeen, and Elmar Lotz, Deloitte
We are grateful to Marc and Elmar for their presentation’s insights and invite you to view the recorded session below:
In their presentation at the Tempus Resource 2020 Virtual Conference, Marc Neckermann of Valkeen, a consulting firm based in Zurich, Switzerland, recounted the process of transforming Deloitte’s PPM to Advanced Resource Portfolio Management (RPM). The change made sense, as “resource management is about getting more done faster while having satisfied employees and customers.”
Elmar Lotz keyed into several Tempus features:
- Heat and cool maps that reveal resource bottlenecks, overbookings, or overcapacities
- Flexible reports that provide utilization rates per group, area, or overall organization
- With scenario simulations, projects can be arranged in a variety of ways, i.e. shifted, extended, or shortened
- Opportunity maps that suggest best possible fit for a project related to the portfolio
- Dashboard views into multiple areas, including number of open demands, demands in progress, new demands, increasing demands in the pipeline, completed projects to date, % or resource usage, and much more
Shifting to advanced RPM
Deloitte began on its journey toward real business agility with a multi-phase implementation plan. First, it was crucial to involve stakeholders in the transformation by gathering. “Those affected need to be involved,” Mr. Neckermann asserts, which is why he led interviews with PMs, team leads, and PMO. In the process, he discovered that major pain point areas included processes that were far too complex and complicated, resulting in unclear responsibilities and poor coordination and communication.
Based on extensive experience, Mr. Neckermann knew that optimization, and ultimately true business agility, isn’t possible without 100% resource transparency. On average, organizations were only about 25% transparent, needing improved views into critical components such as base capacity, net capacity, absences, net availability, plan versus actual, primary roles, secondary roles, and skills.
Once armed with stakeholder feedback that Mr. Neckermann had gathered, Deloitte adopted a new and innovative 2-stage project design process. Phase 1 involved gaining project planning approval; creating a rough plan, based on generic resources, FTEs, roles, teams, and skills; then creating multiple portfolio scenarios, based on models, simulations, and what-if analysis. Phase 2 began once a portfolio scenario was approved—then a second, detailed plan was created with resource commitments, along with forecasting and reporting.
Integrating Tempus Resource
After that, additional process feedback was solicited, refinements made, training completed, and then Tempus was integrated into Deloitte’s current IT demand lifecycle and tool landscape.
The benefits of Tempus were noteworthy:
- 55% more projects completed within the first fiscal year after implementation
- 70% time saved on priority “fast-tracked” projects
- Rate of demands “in progress” vs. “in pipeline” rose from 30% to 50%
- Consolidated workloads saved 21 FTE related to one year
- Same day what-if scenario analytics showed real time effects of project escalation
- Achieved a high PPM maturity level
- Experienced maximum user acceptance for time sheet usage
- Resource insights led to developing a new strategic HR plan to meet future skills demand
- Experienced cross-divisional and cross-location resource utilization, with ease of rebalancing or reassigning teams, and creating new teams
- Portfolio landscape met compliance with ISO 9001 and ISO 27001 standards
- High management attention
- Set a new standard for global IT and business
- Business agility
Transcript: IT Resource Portfolio Management at Deloitte
Thank you Greg for the intro and thank you for having me and Elmar for this conference today. I am very excited to share insights about our project and how we transformed Deloitte’s IT PPM towards an IT resource portfolio management. My name is Marc Neckermann and I am Managing Director for Valkeen, so if you have any questions after the session just reach out to me or to Greg. Here are my contact details. The slides, of course, are going to be shared at least by me after the conference, but I’m pretty sure Greg is going to share them amongst all attendees so just that you know and you don’t have to write everything down.
So the agenda. I guess we are going to talk a lot about resource management during the conference and so do I. We have PPM PMO practitioners and resource managers out there. Some maybe want to further optimize resource management. Some other didn’t even maybe try it, but I want to encourage you to go down that road because resource management is probably the venture where you get a lot of benefit from and I’m not speaking about cost cutting resource leveling only. It’s about getting more done faster while having satisfied employees and satisfied customers.
Today I want to show you how one of our most successful Tempus Resource implementations is designed and what the concrete success factors have been here and that being in that area for almost a decade, a consultant in PPM, there are always two major success factors for an optimized resource management. One is the PPM process; the other one is the tool. And that’s why we chose exactly the same order for our today’s presentation. So I will explain the PPM process we established as a baseline for successfully implementing Tempus Resource. Elmar is going to show you management dashboards and cockpits for what and how the team here concretely uses all the valuable data of Tempus Resource for. And if we have some time left, Elmar will illustrate Deloitte’s next goals within the IT PPM. And we also decided not to run you today through a tool presentation due to a simple lack of time, but I already scheduled a follow-up session in case you’re interested and you see some interesting things here. So on exactly the underlying use case of today I will present Tempus Resource in the best practice process. In order to register, you go to Valkeen.com/Deloitte or just shoot me a message and I will send you an invite afterwards.
Valkeen is a consulting firm based in Zurich, Switzerland. We are certified premium partner for Tempus Resource in Europe and we offer process change, tool services all around PPM. And when we at Valkeen speak about PPM, we always understand portfolio management, project management, process management and resource management. I got very passionate about resource management within the last couple of years because there is a lot of benefit and potential in it, and on average I find a very low level of maturity of and these are is mainly because of two reasons. One is the common PPM tool market, which doesn’t really support the critical resource management capabilities. The problem is PPM tools initially have been developed to do single project management, multi-project management, portfolio management but Tempus Resource started the other way around, which makes it pretty unique on the market. And the other aspect of why the level of maturity is so low is the simple act of awareness toward resource management, but as there are only two means within PPM having budgets and resources assigned in the most efficient way, organizations tend to neglect resource management. Every organization knows pretty good about budgets, business cases and financials, but only a few know who with what skill is working on what for how long, and many companies are steering blindly when it comes to resources. What I will show you in the next two or three minutes applies for any organization and is as well the case for Deloitte when we first started. This is the typical situation in many organizations. As I said, when I implement resource management the majority says and thinks project assignments equal resource transparency, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. What lies within the blindfold usually is the base capacity, the net capacity, absences, business as usual, net availability, plan versus actual, what leads to proper forecasting, primary roles, secondary roles and skills. For an optimized resource management you need 100 percent transparency so there is kind of a zero tolerance policy on blindfold especially for critical resources within the IT.
So in my opinion, in resource management lies one of the one of the highest potentials to gain true business agility and that has been proved by our project with Deloitte because business agility is the ability to adapt and react as an entire organization to change and change is proven by digital business and how can we ensure to still create, deliver, and capture value while constantly being exposed to change? Of course we have to transform our business and our entire organization towards business agility, but that doesn’t mean agile execution only. That doesn’t mean scaling agile via frameworks or just digitizing existing processes or products. It means so much more. It means to transform the entire culture. So how we plan, how we steer, yes as well how we execute, as well how we innovate. And in the innovation lies within the human resources and their skills. On last year’s Gartner PPM Summit, I heard a very inspiring speech by Andreas Ekstrom, who is a Swedish guy and partner for boards of directors and COOs worldwide, and he advises his clients to have a future, take your 10 best resources, lock them in a room for a year and ask then to do nothing else but to develop a product or service that would destroy your business. The good thing about is you will own it and not a future competitor. And that is a direct call for innovation. But how do you know who to lock in that room. Right? Business agility means the ability to react to change and it is for me obvious to me that you can certainly only react and transform accordingly if you know your two input factors, budgets and skills and capacities. Your resources are the true critical path in my opinion and the true investment plan and a higher degree of business agility has truly been achieved by Deloitte and that’s why I took this little excursion in order to make you better understand what Deloitte really has achieved here. So let’s get into it.
Positive aspect : when we first met already in place the awareness for a centralized resource management division, so that was perfect. The challenges, the rising demand quantity, I mean a lot of you guys are facing this these days, right? So the demand quantity doubled compared to the previous year. The demand complexity has been rising to the same amount like the demand quantity so from purely implementation project we observed a shift towards sustainable programs with high degree of specialization. With it of course, rising demand for quantity, IT resources became scarce and limited. Therefore, project shifts happened unwillingly. Right? The growth within the IT was about 25 percent per average year. This is a huge number that has to be managed in a healthy way. The process and the tool landscape pretty much connected to each other so there wasn’t any unified process applied and understood by all participants and stakeholders so that resulted in unplanned costs and distortions on showstoppers of the entire portfolio. The reason is because so many initiatives just ran besides the process and the tool landscape again was not very applicable for resource management. Here again the journey started earlier with spreadsheets over to the share point lists over to MS project server. This was the basic status quo when we first started.
So what to do? Continue to grow to meet the growing number of demands? Not an option with having 25 percent already in growth. Outsourcing is not really an option due to the high level of complexity. So we had to optimize resource utilization in concrete terms to become more efficient, faster and better but how? The Deloitte IT team committed themselves to a road map and this was defined by clear targets. We have to increase efficiency of resource utilization. We have to improve speed and resource and improve speed and response time. Process and prioritization optimization and the tool landscape obviously had to be optimized too. So we started with a PoC. Besides a drag and drop interface for Excel, Tempus Resource offers plug and play interfaces to various other PPM tools as well as Microsoft Project Server. So we interface Tempus Resource between I think 15 or 20 minutes and the team could immediately start testing with their own real data. After less than 14 days, the team decided we have to proceed with Tempus Resource. With resource management always cultural change management has to start and never end because there isn’t any PPM dimension affecting more stakeholders than resource management. Change management is key. I’ll get to this point later. With that in mind, based on stakeholder feedback, we designed a best practice process in two stages. A demand factory has been incorporated and fast tracks and a new prioritization procedure. I’ll follow up on this in a second. And last but not last least, we implemented Tempus Resource. We chose an iterative approach here. So implementing both, the process and the tool continuously simultaneously optimizing.
We will have a closer look at these three steps now starting with the stakeholder analysis. For a change, the affected of course need to become the involved especially in resource management. Therefore, I conducted stakeholder interviews with representatives of project managers, team leads, PMO, PPM and resource management. Highly efficient because each took 30 minutes virtually and anonymously meaning everyone was able to speak completely freely. The major findings were process related and, of course, tool related. The existing process was reported to be too complex and too complicated; it takes way too much time; unclear responsibilities; difficult coordination; and lack of communication base. The last three points leads to the second area of findings, the lack of a central database and the lack of a single source of truth here. The project server related outcome was bad usability for resource planning, project planning and no motivation for time tracking. Who likes time tracking? No one does, but at least you should have some benefit from it to see on which project or how long within that week you are assigned to in order to track your hours, but this wasn’t the case here. So all of it clearly no foundation for more speed and efficiency. With that pain point in mind that helped us to define and design this two-staged process based on best practices addressing all the pain points from the stakeholder analysis.
Let’s jump into the process. First the basic philosophy of the process. This is found in many organizations in the past and it was sufficient for a small quantity of demands. But what happens here is a project request that gathers basic information such as KPIs, urgency, maybe a management summary and he gets the approval during a pitch and continues with the planning phase. And the planning I saw it took two, three, maybe four months and it incorporated a lot of other stakeholders, and then after half a year sometimes just before the project kicks off they realize the skills and capacities aren’t available any more. So that’s a huge problem here. Therefore, the basic idea of the process is to divide the planning into two phases or two stages. The first planning is a rough plan, so what is necessary to really approve. So we have approval factors besides the one we had here, we now add the feasibility at least based on a rough plan on generics and FTEs. Therefore, we only approve what is feasible in order to then be planned accordingly on a much more detailed base, but we have a commitment for the resources and the feasibility.
That’s the basic idea and this is what it looks like. This is an original slide from Deloitte and how the process looks like. We have a portfolio and a resource management process here displayed and I will guide you through the four major aspects of this process. First one is one process for all initiatives, so meaning either if it is a change management, a demand, a project, business as usual, even absences, whatever it is, it has to follow this resource management process. And why is that? You remember the tip of the iceberg and the blindfold. You have to have a 360 degree picture on your resources and, therefore, project assignments won’t do the trick here. Second aspect, two-stage approval. First approval stage operational committee. In order to approve, you do a rough plan on generics, on FTEs, estimation of effort on roles, teams, skills, and bottlenecks, whatever you choose. This is done in Tempus Resource. You then go into modeling what ifs, simulation and check for feasibility. It may result in maybe one, two or three different portfolio scenarios you compare to each other and you will present those to the operational committee. One is going to be approved and then you follow up with a detailed plan. What is beautiful in Tempus Resource is it fully supports the reassignment of the first generic resource plan in order to assign named resources based on tasks. But the operational committee not only approves the entire project, it approves certain thresholds for time, for scope, for budget as well for capacities, so it’s quite common and I see that very often that during the detailed planning phase you of course may exceed some thresholds, but therefore you have a checkpoint here and if you exceed those it has to be re-assessed, re-simulated if it affects any other projects in the pipeline, in the funnel, or within the running portfolio.
Third aspect, fast tracks, an optimized priority process and pre-defined characteristics such as size, length and impact for the customer at least has been characterized during the evaluation phase. And what happens here, as soon as a demand is classified as a fast track, it will be directly processed into the detailed planning phase what gained a lot of speed here.
Last part and last aspect is my most favorite one, the so-called demand factory. It’s placed during the evaluation and the planning phase. Quick story. To that I often get asked, how do we assure a good and robust planning within the first stage. Our project request the project manager isn’t able to do that. In order to support project request at a very early stage we incorporated in the demand factory. It’s a virtual team of trusted advisors and it’s a win-win situation for both sides, for the project requestor as well as for the demand factory because the members of the demand factory are pretty interested in being involved at a very, very early stage of the demand so they can raise their hands and claim redundancy and whatever else. And these guys I interviewed too and that’s what I heard from the interview and that has been incorporated into the process. They are now lined up at a very early stage. So the demand factory consists of a core team and a case-by-case team. I don’t go into this with any further detail. I share the slides anyways. This is a slide as well from Deloitte what describes the duties and tasks of the demand factory in detail. So from the business side, when we talk about client business, this is the client. They gather information and during the evaluation and the planning phase, that’s the job to help and advise via the demand factory, the project requestor. And besides the other aspects they do, they have to support with the proper first resource planning because this is the foundation to simulate and check for the feasibility on the entire portfolio what then is the stage one approval.
So having this entire process design now serves as the baseline for the implementation. So instead of implementing Tempus Resource and the underlying process with a big bang, instead of having Tempus Resource go live data here, we decide to go step by step with each one of them meaning always involving all the stakeholders continuously optimizing, checking for individual use cases, asking for ideas and any inputs what would you like better about this process. We further conducted trainings one hour for project managers, two hours for resource managers and four hours for administrators and really top users so this was the setup here. We established a first role concept and I could easily speak about generic roles and role concepts for another hour, but all I can say here is the ideal quantity of generic resources should be somewhere between 5 and 20 percent of your current resource pool size. Tempus Resource was integrated into the current tool landscape and this slide here displays not only the current tool landscape but as well the demand life cycle. So we have the business unit, the client gathering information towards a demand in service now. And service now is a beautiful tool to do that from a customer front end, you name it. Of course service now had to be evaluated and a potential PPM and resource management solution because service now is doing PPM right now. But to save you some time, service now isn’t a resource management tool. It’s great for service management and there isn’t a one size fits all tool out there any more like in the past especially when it comes to highly complex disciplines like resource management. Having a demand here putting into Tempus Resource, doing a first generic resource plan what if simulation in order to being approved by the operational committee and continuing with the detailed plan over to execution, project reporting, everything here.
Tempus Resource single source of truth and this what I’m going to present next week, same time, when you’re interested in how the process looks in Tempus Resource. This is going to happen next week. Additional documents on solution design and maybe some cost calculations, but most importantly the connection to the power BI and the SQL server. First of all, it was the SQL server panel and now it’s going to be the Power BI dashboard solution here. Therefore Tempus Resource has a DB connector what is separate application which is highly performant and enables you to interface almost any BI solution out there.
Let’s get to the harvest of the PPM roadmap. Thanks to an optimized process and resource transparency through Tempus Resource, Deloitte achieved complete twice as many projects during the first fiscal year after implementation (55 percent). More speed due to the new priority process demands with high impact would have been faster and could have been processed immediately, so that saved about 70 percent of time just labeled as fast track. Elmar will show you how these figures are going to be measured on a constant base so these numbers are being measured constantly concentrating on the essentials (very important) so the ratio between demands and progress versus the ones in pipeline raised from 30 to 50 percent during the first year. Very, very, very unique here due to Tempus Resource what ifs capability and simulations, all the effort, all the time, what it takes to see the consequences of any change now in real time. Other aspects, the ITS came to be regarded as the professional partner now because of the new high maturity level within PPM and you will see that in the dashboards and cockpits Elmar is going to show you in a minute.
Maximum user acceptance for planning and timesheet, resource planning, project planning and timesheet usage. We started to derive strategic HR plan that hasn’t even been on the roadmap of goals at the beginning, but this is a side product because you have the heat map, you have generic roles, you have skills, you start to see your shortage if it’s a peak just for a month or is it something what we need for future? So this is something you have to connect to the HR department.
Cross divisional, cross locational resource utilization. This one is really, really strong, so either if you are in the line organization, matrix organization or now so-called product line organization, dedicated teams having a resource management database in place enables you to do almost anything, re-balancing team, re-assigning team, putting new teams together for innovative projects and as well look beyond your current department, current location, to other locations. This happened for Deloitte Germany and this is as well the potential for applying resources globally. Our portfolio, the portfolio landscape became compliant with common standards, high management attention via power BI dashboards. Those you will see presented by Elmar in the next couple of minutes. You will see what I mean by higher management attention and if you don’t have the management attention, you will probably get it if you have the first numbers. We have get a new standard for global IT and the business. Another thing, so this is being seen by business units they now start to adapt exactly what we did for the team of the IT and almost all benefits you have seen here enabled for true business agility because you have managed the critical path, your resources accordingly.
So, Elmar will show you now the data coming from Tempus Resource is processed for decision making, business agility and, from my point of view, this will lift resource management to a whole new level. So I have to give Elmar the rights to present all this, this is going to be done by Greg I guess, so he can continue with the part Tempus Resource at Deloitte.
IT Resource Management at Deloitte
I’m just making a short introduction of myself. I am Elmar Lotz, IT Project Portfolio Manager in German department of Deloitte. I’m working for Deloitte for nearly 18 years in different roles and positions in the IT department and now for six or seven year’s experiences in resource management and portfolio management. And to come to Deloitte for now because I’m not introducing Deloitte so long because I think most of you know Deloitte and I don’t have to give you many facts about Deloitte itself. It’s more important to show you what Marc explained before that we come to what benefit we have of Tempus and the new process or the current process. Deloitte, we are a worldwide working company with about 300,000 professionals in 150 countries. In Germany we have 9,000 professionals and we are in the area dedicated. What challenges we faced in our IT department in the last years is the enormous growth of Deloitte in Germany because we have growth about 20 percent over the last four or five years not only from revenue but also from our professional so our people are also growing that fast and we have to grow with them or have to more efficient in a way because normally we cannot grow in that kind of way and cannot get so much employees and that’s why we have to find ways to be more efficient and so on.
What we have done last year, we tried not to be a cost center in Detroit, so as normal internal services are. We come to a strategic partnership with our business so we also have audit, risk advisory, consulting, financial advisory, tax and legal, enabling services, also global department on the one side, and on the other side we have our department, I think not so different from your departments as well. And what we try is to give all our experiences, our expertise to the businesses and say to them come on, we are the best in technologies and also better than your consultants or employees and let us be part of the added value of this company and since the last one or two years we come to that that we have also IT project teams on client projects and we are generating revenue with this teams and that’s a good thing because we can show our businesses we have the expertise we can support you in different ways. Not only internal that we give you technologies like laptops and mobile phone service and so on. Now we can also be a strategic part of your business and that’s why we need to be transparent and we must show all our data to our management and how we can do that so here you see some screenshots of Tempus Resource now and we are planning not only our projects, everything, all our operating tasks as Marc mentioned, absences, projects, all we have in Tempus Resource, we have single point of data for that and then we can fast see in a really smart way how to utilize our resources, employees in which groups and so on and we can simulate and model what happened if we shift or stretch or shorten a project what happened to the teams, what happened to the different employees with their availability, utilization, planning, hours, and so on. That’s why our data is the power to come there.
Here is another screenshot of how we simulate scenarios how we can do it and we have opportunity maps . So, for example, if a new project is submitted and we have to give fast initial information, we can start a project. Or what happens with other projects when we start a new one? You can see it in 5 or 10 minutes if you want it really fast. In the past we’ve had to simulate these things with Excel or Power Point manually and that costs so much time. I think we save 80 percent of our time and can do other things or what I show in the next slides we can create management views about this data what we can do and what we couldn’t do in the past. So this is our portfolio management dashboard and all what you can see here in facts and figures and visuals is data out of Tempus from the SQL database and we put it into an SQL reporting server and we take screenshots like this and we are commenting and creating management views on this as you see how many demands we have in our portfolio, what demands are closed, how many mandates we spend on these demands, what is the distribution of priorities, and also in planned resources by type, and so on. The most interesting thing for sure is the workload of resources, and as you see, we can show every day for the current month or the next month, the current situation of our resources. As you see here, we are overbooked also for the next month. That is not the best situation, but we have the transparency to our management to show it and we can say, come on if you have a new project you must be aware that we have to shift some of the existing things. And what is behind that we have also a deeper dive into this front dashboard so we can see data and facts about a year or about some months to see what development of the data is, so if we have done some activities that the workload is not so high and not so overbooked, we can see how is the development about the last month and see maybe if we did the right activities to allow the workload. What we do also with these facts from Tempus is something like that. We show our businesses who are the effort drivers and what are the effort drivers for us.
Also here what we want to show is that we are strategic partners for our businesses, not only a cost center so we say, come on. The most things we do is not for us or to keep the lights on, it’s that you can do your business, that you can go to your clients and have the newest technologies or newest applications and so on. As you see on the right top here, only 60 percent of our time our effort is for the businesses and not internal operating. I think that’s a very good value for that also that we create such management views out of the Tempus starter and I will show you yet now some other also this driven slides or management reports we did last month, for example, for different businesses how is the distribution of priorities, but I think also here the most interesting thing in considering Tempus is so we say what we are doing the last month or the last year, and I think we did it for the last year for you and what we do for national and global things. You see also here we have here nearly 50/50 what we do directly for our businesses and which priority. Also this shows this again because we have three categories of so-called demand targets. We have lean IT, business enablement, and business integration.
Lean IT is really everything we do for operating so to improve, for example, change this environment or something like that. Then we have business enablement that is all the efforts that we do for our business to enable them to do the businesses, to process client projects or client related things. Business integration is everything where we are part of the added value chain, so we are generating revenue with this effort we do. So as you see in some teams like here nearly half of the team generates added value so we can show our management really fast because of Tempus how we do this and how we can get a higher value for our whole company.
This is the same information in a little bit different way, but it shows really the same so also here it’s the visual you see in the upper right some slides before and, as you see, every time we try to tell a story how we are developed, how we are working with our businesses. Also this was an interesting thing. This we could do really fast because of the data from Tempus, we have to consolidate our portfolio because we had so much new projects and we have to deny some projects. Here is how we do that, how we categorize the different projects so we say, come on, we have some like here we finalize some projects that are processing and nearly implemented or deployed so it makes no sense that we stop then or deny them. Then we have high prioritized projects and then you see the distribution, how we measure which projects we have to deny and what’s the impact. Then you see we have denied projects or deny and defer projects and we save 5,000 man days over a year for example. We can show that how we can save an IT budget from nearly EUR 1.0M for the next year for example. And then you see how this is distributed about the businesses and every business can now make its decision if we do it like this or not.
This was the final result of our consolidation. As you see last month every time we have an overbooking of our resources also for the next three months and after this consolidation so we talk about 21 FTE related to a year we can show as soon as possible with the data also from Tempus that we reduce our workload from something around 130 percent to under 100 to 93 and that is the result of the consolidation and we can show it nearly in real time with Tempus Resource.
So, I hope that was interesting and I could give you a good look into our doing from Deloitte IT in Germany and that helps you to find a decision to Tempus Resource or what Marc told to better
Processes and so on.
Thank you, Elmar. And to wrap up, that was beautiful to see how an IT being a cost center
before, so you can just leave the presentation on for maybe another minute. To see how the IT developed itself because I see it in so many organizations because the business units, they just don’t understand why the IT isn’t able and capable to do more and more and more. Now the IT is able to display in order with the FTE already consumed with each business unit and answer the question why isn’t it possible because we already had these things going on especially for you guys, so this is why the IT became a partner rather than just the cost center. So these figures really interesting and a lot of benefit from that.
Elmar, if you go to the next two slides we have maybe 2 minutes what the future goals are. The first one is what you always have to keep in mind having a resource management in place to keep up with user acceptance continuously asking stakeholders how you could further optimize sides, process and tool. The team will now go towards a multi-dimensional skill matrix so the roles or the skills will be further developed. This is the current next goal set. The business units now tend to understand more about resource management and what the benefit is and they start to adapt what the IT did as kind of a role model and of course something we all have in mind already, something already spoken about, resource management over maybe utilizing resources across many departments, even locations what tends to be the answer for the future. If you have a shortage of resource capacities and skills to look not only into other divisions, other locations like nationally but globally.
So this is the maybe the last slide, the last one Elmar. We will share any slides so you can read through them. This is a Deloitte slide, the idea of the global RPM to leverage a common resource pool in order to have a centralized initiation phase to understand redundancy, to generate synergies as well as to leverage a common skill and pool of resources.
So this is pretty much it. Thank you for your attention and I hand over back to Greg. Thank you, Elmar.
Transcript: IT Resource Portfolio Management at Deloitte
Thank you Greg for the intro and thank you for having me and Elmar for this conference today. I am very excited to share insights about our project and how we transformed Deloitte’s IT PPM towards an IT resource portfolio management. My name is Marc Neckermann and I am Managing Director for Valkeen, so if you have any questions after the session just reach out to me or to Greg. Here are my contact details. The slides, of course, are going to be shared at least by me after the conference, but I’m pretty sure Greg is going to share them amongst all attendees so just that you know and you don’t have to write everything down.
So the agenda. I guess we are going to talk a lot about resource management during the conference and so do I. We have PPM PMO practitioners and resource managers out there. Some maybe want to further optimize resource management. Some other didn’t even maybe try it, but I want to encourage you to go down that road because resource management is probably the venture where you get a lot of benefit from and I’m not speaking about cost cutting resource leveling only. It’s about getting more done faster while having satisfied employees and satisfied customers.
Today I want to show you how one of our most successful Tempus Resource implementations is designed and what the concrete success factors have been here and that being in that area for almost a decade, a consultant in PPM, there are always two major success factors for an optimized resource management. One is the PPM process; the other one is the tool. And that’s why we chose exactly the same order for our today’s presentation. So I will explain the PPM process we established as a baseline for successfully implementing Tempus Resource. Elmar is going to show you management dashboards and cockpits for what and how the team here concretely uses all the valuable data of Tempus Resource for. And if we have some time left, Elmar will illustrate Deloitte’s next goals within the IT PPM. And we also decided not to run you today through a tool presentation due to a simple lack of time, but I already scheduled a follow-up session in case you’re interested and you see some interesting things here. So on exactly the underlying use case of today I will present Tempus Resource in the best practice process. In order to register, you go to Valkeen.com/Deloitte or just shoot me a message and I will send you an invite afterwards.
Valkeen is a consulting firm based in Zurich, Switzerland. We are certified premium partner for Tempus Resource in Europe and we offer process change, tool services all around PPM. And when we at Valkeen speak about PPM, we always understand portfolio management, project management, process management and resource management. I got very passionate about resource management within the last couple of years because there is a lot of benefit and potential in it, and on average I find a very low level of maturity of and these are is mainly because of two reasons. One is the common PPM tool market, which doesn’t really support the critical resource management capabilities. The problem is PPM tools initially have been developed to do single project management, multi-project management, portfolio management but Tempus Resource started the other way around, which makes it pretty unique on the market. And the other aspect of why the level of maturity is so low is the simple act of awareness toward resource management, but as there are only two means within PPM having budgets and resources assigned in the most efficient way, organizations tend to neglect resource management. Every organization knows pretty good about budgets, business cases and financials, but only a few know who with what skill is working on what for how long, and many companies are steering blindly when it comes to resources. What I will show you in the next two or three minutes applies for any organization and is as well the case for Deloitte when we first started. This is the typical situation in many organizations. As I said, when I implement resource management the majority says and thinks project assignments equal resource transparency, but this is only the tip of the iceberg. What lies within the blindfold usually is the base capacity, the net capacity, absences, business as usual, net availability, plan versus actual, what leads to proper forecasting, primary roles, secondary roles and skills. For an optimized resource management you need 100 percent transparency so there is kind of a zero tolerance policy on blindfold especially for critical resources within the IT.
So in my opinion, in resource management lies one of the one of the highest potentials to gain true business agility and that has been proved by our project with Deloitte because business agility is the ability to adapt and react as an entire organization to change and change is proven by digital business and how can we ensure to still create, deliver, and capture value while constantly being exposed to change? Of course we have to transform our business and our entire organization towards business agility, but that doesn’t mean agile execution only. That doesn’t mean scaling agile via frameworks or just digitizing existing processes or products. It means so much more. It means to transform the entire culture. So how we plan, how we steer, yes as well how we execute, as well how we innovate. And in the innovation lies within the human resources and their skills. On last year’s Gartner PPM Summit, I heard a very inspiring speech by Andreas Ekstrom, who is a Swedish guy and partner for boards of directors and COOs worldwide, and he advises his clients to have a future, take your 10 best resources, lock them in a room for a year and ask then to do nothing else but to develop a product or service that would destroy your business. The good thing about is you will own it and not a future competitor. And that is a direct call for innovation. But how do you know who to lock in that room. Right? Business agility means the ability to react to change and it is for me obvious to me that you can certainly only react and transform accordingly if you know your two input factors, budgets and skills and capacities. Your resources are the true critical path in my opinion and the true investment plan and a higher degree of business agility has truly been achieved by Deloitte and that’s why I took this little excursion in order to make you better understand what Deloitte really has achieved here. So let’s get into it.
Positive aspect : when we first met already in place the awareness for a centralized resource management division, so that was perfect. The challenges, the rising demand quantity, I mean a lot of you guys are facing this these days, right? So the demand quantity doubled compared to the previous year. The demand complexity has been rising to the same amount like the demand quantity so from purely implementation project we observed a shift towards sustainable programs with high degree of specialization. With it of course, rising demand for quantity, IT resources became scarce and limited. Therefore, project shifts happened unwillingly. Right? The growth within the IT was about 25 percent per average year. This is a huge number that has to be managed in a healthy way. The process and the tool landscape pretty much connected to each other so there wasn’t any unified process applied and understood by all participants and stakeholders so that resulted in unplanned costs and distortions on showstoppers of the entire portfolio. The reason is because so many initiatives just ran besides the process and the tool landscape again was not very applicable for resource management. Here again the journey started earlier with spreadsheets over to the share point lists over to MS project server. This was the basic status quo when we first started.
So what to do? Continue to grow to meet the growing number of demands? Not an option with having 25 percent already in growth. Outsourcing is not really an option due to the high level of complexity. So we had to optimize resource utilization in concrete terms to become more efficient, faster and better but how? The Deloitte IT team committed themselves to a road map and this was defined by clear targets. We have to increase efficiency of resource utilization. We have to improve speed and resource and improve speed and response time. Process and prioritization optimization and the tool landscape obviously had to be optimized too. So we started with a PoC. Besides a drag and drop interface for Excel, Tempus Resource offers plug and play interfaces to various other PPM tools as well as Microsoft Project Server. So we interface Tempus Resource between I think 15 or 20 minutes and the team could immediately start testing with their own real data. After less than 14 days, the team decided we have to proceed with Tempus Resource. With resource management always cultural change management has to start and never end because there isn’t any PPM dimension affecting more stakeholders than resource management. Change management is key. I’ll get to this point later. With that in mind, based on stakeholder feedback, we designed a best practice process in two stages. A demand factory has been incorporated and fast tracks and a new prioritization procedure. I’ll follow up on this in a second. And last but not last least, we implemented Tempus Resource. We chose an iterative approach here. So implementing both, the process and the tool continuously simultaneously optimizing.
We will have a closer look at these three steps now starting with the stakeholder analysis. For a change, the affected of course need to become the involved especially in resource management. Therefore, I conducted stakeholder interviews with representatives of project managers, team leads, PMO, PPM and resource management. Highly efficient because each took 30 minutes virtually and anonymously meaning everyone was able to speak completely freely. The major findings were process related and, of course, tool related. The existing process was reported to be too complex and too complicated; it takes way too much time; unclear responsibilities; difficult coordination; and lack of communication base. The last three points leads to the second area of findings, the lack of a central database and the lack of a single source of truth here. The project server related outcome was bad usability for resource planning, project planning and no motivation for time tracking. Who likes time tracking? No one does, but at least you should have some benefit from it to see on which project or how long within that week you are assigned to in order to track your hours, but this wasn’t the case here. So all of it clearly no foundation for more speed and efficiency. With that pain point in mind that helped us to define and design this two-staged process based on best practices addressing all the pain points from the stakeholder analysis.
Let’s jump into the process. First the basic philosophy of the process. This is found in many organizations in the past and it was sufficient for a small quantity of demands. But what happens here is a project request that gathers basic information such as KPIs, urgency, maybe a management summary and he gets the approval during a pitch and continues with the planning phase. And the planning I saw it took two, three, maybe four months and it incorporated a lot of other stakeholders, and then after half a year sometimes just before the project kicks off they realize the skills and capacities aren’t available any more. So that’s a huge problem here. Therefore, the basic idea of the process is to divide the planning into two phases or two stages. The first planning is a rough plan, so what is necessary to really approve. So we have approval factors besides the one we had here, we now add the feasibility at least based on a rough plan on generics and FTEs. Therefore, we only approve what is feasible in order to then be planned accordingly on a much more detailed base, but we have a commitment for the resources and the feasibility.
That’s the basic idea and this is what it looks like. This is an original slide from Deloitte and how the process looks like. We have a portfolio and a resource management process here displayed and I will guide you through the four major aspects of this process. First one is one process for all initiatives, so meaning either if it is a change management, a demand, a project, business as usual, even absences, whatever it is, it has to follow this resource management process. And why is that? You remember the tip of the iceberg and the blindfold. You have to have a 360 degree picture on your resources and, therefore, project assignments won’t do the trick here. Second aspect, two-stage approval. First approval stage operational committee. In order to approve, you do a rough plan on generics, on FTEs, estimation of effort on roles, teams, skills, and bottlenecks, whatever you choose. This is done in Tempus Resource. You then go into modeling what ifs, simulation and check for feasibility. It may result in maybe one, two or three different portfolio scenarios you compare to each other and you will present those to the operational committee. One is going to be approved and then you follow up with a detailed plan. What is beautiful in Tempus Resource is it fully supports the reassignment of the first generic resource plan in order to assign named resources based on tasks. But the operational committee not only approves the entire project, it approves certain thresholds for time, for scope, for budget as well for capacities, so it’s quite common and I see that very often that during the detailed planning phase you of course may exceed some thresholds, but therefore you have a checkpoint here and if you exceed those it has to be re-assessed, re-simulated if it affects any other projects in the pipeline, in the funnel, or within the running portfolio.
Third aspect, fast tracks, an optimized priority process and pre-defined characteristics such as size, length and impact for the customer at least has been characterized during the evaluation phase. And what happens here, as soon as a demand is classified as a fast track, it will be directly processed into the detailed planning phase what gained a lot of speed here.
Last part and last aspect is my most favorite one, the so-called demand factory. It’s placed during the evaluation and the planning phase. Quick story. To that I often get asked, how do we assure a good and robust planning within the first stage. Our project request the project manager isn’t able to do that. In order to support project request at a very early stage we incorporated in the demand factory. It’s a virtual team of trusted advisors and it’s a win-win situation for both sides, for the project requestor as well as for the demand factory because the members of the demand factory are pretty interested in being involved at a very, very early stage of the demand so they can raise their hands and claim redundancy and whatever else. And these guys I interviewed too and that’s what I heard from the interview and that has been incorporated into the process. They are now lined up at a very early stage. So the demand factory consists of a core team and a case-by-case team. I don’t go into this with any further detail. I share the slides anyways. This is a slide as well from Deloitte what describes the duties and tasks of the demand factory in detail. So from the business side, when we talk about client business, this is the client. They gather information and during the evaluation and the planning phase, that’s the job to help and advise via the demand factory, the project requestor. And besides the other aspects they do, they have to support with the proper first resource planning because this is the foundation to simulate and check for the feasibility on the entire portfolio what then is the stage one approval.
So having this entire process design now serves as the baseline for the implementation. So instead of implementing Tempus Resource and the underlying process with a big bang, instead of having Tempus Resource go live data here, we decide to go step by step with each one of them meaning always involving all the stakeholders continuously optimizing, checking for individual use cases, asking for ideas and any inputs what would you like better about this process. We further conducted trainings one hour for project managers, two hours for resource managers and four hours for administrators and really top users so this was the setup here. We established a first role concept and I could easily speak about generic roles and role concepts for another hour, but all I can say here is the ideal quantity of generic resources should be somewhere between 5 and 20 percent of your current resource pool size. Tempus Resource was integrated into the current tool landscape and this slide here displays not only the current tool landscape but as well the demand life cycle. So we have the business unit, the client gathering information towards a demand in service now. And service now is a beautiful tool to do that from a customer front end, you name it. Of course service now had to be evaluated and a potential PPM and resource management solution because service now is doing PPM right now. But to save you some time, service now isn’t a resource management tool. It’s great for service management and there isn’t a one size fits all tool out there any more like in the past especially when it comes to highly complex disciplines like resource management. Having a demand here putting into Tempus Resource, doing a first generic resource plan what if simulation in order to being approved by the operational committee and continuing with the detailed plan over to execution, project reporting, everything here.
Tempus Resource single source of truth and this what I’m going to present next week, same time, when you’re interested in how the process looks in Tempus Resource. This is going to happen next week. Additional documents on solution design and maybe some cost calculations, but most importantly the connection to the power BI and the SQL server. First of all, it was the SQL server panel and now it’s going to be the Power BI dashboard solution here. Therefore Tempus Resource has a DB connector what is separate application which is highly performant and enables you to interface almost any BI solution out there.
Let’s get to the harvest of the PPM roadmap. Thanks to an optimized process and resource transparency through Tempus Resource, Deloitte achieved complete twice as many projects during the first fiscal year after implementation (55 percent). More speed due to the new priority process demands with high impact would have been faster and could have been processed immediately, so that saved about 70 percent of time just labeled as fast track. Elmar will show you how these figures are going to be measured on a constant base so these numbers are being measured constantly concentrating on the essentials (very important) so the ratio between demands and progress versus the ones in pipeline raised from 30 to 50 percent during the first year. Very, very, very unique here due to Tempus Resource what ifs capability and simulations, all the effort, all the time, what it takes to see the consequences of any change now in real time. Other aspects, the ITS came to be regarded as the professional partner now because of the new high maturity level within PPM and you will see that in the dashboards and cockpits Elmar is going to show you in a minute.
Maximum user acceptance for planning and timesheet, resource planning, project planning and timesheet usage. We started to derive strategic HR plan that hasn’t even been on the roadmap of goals at the beginning, but this is a side product because you have the heat map, you have generic roles, you have skills, you start to see your shortage if it’s a peak just for a month or is it something what we need for future? So this is something you have to connect to the HR department.
Cross divisional, cross locational resource utilization. This one is really, really strong, so either if you are in the line organization, matrix organization or now so-called product line organization, dedicated teams having a resource management database in place enables you to do almost anything, re-balancing team, re-assigning team, putting new teams together for innovative projects and as well look beyond your current department, current location, to other locations. This happened for Deloitte Germany and this is as well the potential for applying resources globally. Our portfolio, the portfolio landscape became compliant with common standards, high management attention via power BI dashboards. Those you will see presented by Elmar in the next couple of minutes. You will see what I mean by higher management attention and if you don’t have the management attention, you will probably get it if you have the first numbers. We have get a new standard for global IT and the business. Another thing, so this is being seen by business units they now start to adapt exactly what we did for the team of the IT and almost all benefits you have seen here enabled for true business agility because you have managed the critical path, your resources accordingly.
So, Elmar will show you now the data coming from Tempus Resource is processed for decision making, business agility and, from my point of view, this will lift resource management to a whole new level. So I have to give Elmar the rights to present all this, this is going to be done by Greg I guess, so he can continue with the part Tempus Resource at Deloitte.
IT Resource Management at Deloitte
I’m just making a short introduction of myself. I am Elmar Lotz, IT Project Portfolio Manager in German department of Deloitte. I’m working for Deloitte for nearly 18 years in different roles and positions in the IT department and now for six or seven year’s experiences in resource management and portfolio management. And to come to Deloitte for now because I’m not introducing Deloitte so long because I think most of you know Deloitte and I don’t have to give you many facts about Deloitte itself. It’s more important to show you what Marc explained before that we come to what benefit we have of Tempus and the new process or the current process. Deloitte, we are a worldwide working company with about 300,000 professionals in 150 countries. In Germany we have 9,000 professionals and we are in the area dedicated. What challenges we faced in our IT department in the last years is the enormous growth of Deloitte in Germany because we have growth about 20 percent over the last four or five years not only from revenue but also from our professional so our people are also growing that fast and we have to grow with them or have to more efficient in a way because normally we cannot grow in that kind of way and cannot get so much employees and that’s why we have to find ways to be more efficient and so on.
What we have done last year, we tried not to be a cost center in Detroit, so as normal internal services are. We come to a strategic partnership with our business so we also have audit, risk advisory, consulting, financial advisory, tax and legal, enabling services, also global department on the one side, and on the other side we have our department, I think not so different from your departments as well. And what we try is to give all our experiences, our expertise to the businesses and say to them come on, we are the best in technologies and also better than your consultants or employees and let us be part of the added value of this company and since the last one or two years we come to that that we have also IT project teams on client projects and we are generating revenue with this teams and that’s a good thing because we can show our businesses we have the expertise we can support you in different ways. Not only internal that we give you technologies like laptops and mobile phone service and so on. Now we can also be a strategic part of your business and that’s why we need to be transparent and we must show all our data to our management and how we can do that so here you see some screenshots of Tempus Resource now and we are planning not only our projects, everything, all our operating tasks as Marc mentioned, absences, projects, all we have in Tempus Resource, we have single point of data for that and then we can fast see in a really smart way how to utilize our resources, employees in which groups and so on and we can simulate and model what happened if we shift or stretch or shorten a project what happened to the teams, what happened to the different employees with their availability, utilization, planning, hours, and so on. That’s why our data is the power to come there.
Here is another screenshot of how we simulate scenarios how we can do it and we have opportunity maps . So, for example, if a new project is submitted and we have to give fast initial information, we can start a project. Or what happens with other projects when we start a new one? You can see it in 5 or 10 minutes if you want it really fast. In the past we’ve had to simulate these things with Excel or Power Point manually and that costs so much time. I think we save 80 percent of our time and can do other things or what I show in the next slides we can create management views about this data what we can do and what we couldn’t do in the past. So this is our portfolio management dashboard and all what you can see here in facts and figures and visuals is data out of Tempus from the SQL database and we put it into an SQL reporting server and we take screenshots like this and we are commenting and creating management views on this as you see how many demands we have in our portfolio, what demands are closed, how many mandates we spend on these demands, what is the distribution of priorities, and also in planned resources by type, and so on. The most interesting thing for sure is the workload of resources, and as you see, we can show every day for the current month or the next month, the current situation of our resources. As you see here, we are overbooked also for the next month. That is not the best situation, but we have the transparency to our management to show it and we can say, come on if you have a new project you must be aware that we have to shift some of the existing things. And what is behind that we have also a deeper dive into this front dashboard so we can see data and facts about a year or about some months to see what development of the data is, so if we have done some activities that the workload is not so high and not so overbooked, we can see how is the development about the last month and see maybe if we did the right activities to allow the workload. What we do also with these facts from Tempus is something like that. We show our businesses who are the effort drivers and what are the effort drivers for us.
Also here what we want to show is that we are strategic partners for our businesses, not only a cost center so we say, come on. The most things we do is not for us or to keep the lights on, it’s that you can do your business, that you can go to your clients and have the newest technologies or newest applications and so on. As you see on the right top here, only 60 percent of our time our effort is for the businesses and not internal operating. I think that’s a very good value for that also that we create such management views out of the Tempus starter and I will show you yet now some other also this driven slides or management reports we did last month, for example, for different businesses how is the distribution of priorities, but I think also here the most interesting thing in considering Tempus is so we say what we are doing the last month or the last year, and I think we did it for the last year for you and what we do for national and global things. You see also here we have here nearly 50/50 what we do directly for our businesses and which priority. Also this shows this again because we have three categories of so-called demand targets. We have lean IT, business enablement, and business integration.
Lean IT is really everything we do for operating so to improve, for example, change this environment or something like that. Then we have business enablement that is all the efforts that we do for our business to enable them to do the businesses, to process client projects or client related things. Business integration is everything where we are part of the added value chain, so we are generating revenue with this effort we do. So as you see in some teams like here nearly half of the team generates added value so we can show our management really fast because of Tempus how we do this and how we can get a higher value for our whole company.
This is the same information in a little bit different way, but it shows really the same so also here it’s the visual you see in the upper right some slides before and, as you see, every time we try to tell a story how we are developed, how we are working with our businesses. Also this was an interesting thing. This we could do really fast because of the data from Tempus, we have to consolidate our portfolio because we had so much new projects and we have to deny some projects. Here is how we do that, how we categorize the different projects so we say, come on, we have some like here we finalize some projects that are processing and nearly implemented or deployed so it makes no sense that we stop then or deny them. Then we have high prioritized projects and then you see the distribution, how we measure which projects we have to deny and what’s the impact. Then you see we have denied projects or deny and defer projects and we save 5,000 man days over a year for example. We can show that how we can save an IT budget from nearly EUR 1.0M for the next year for example. And then you see how this is distributed about the businesses and every business can now make its decision if we do it like this or not.
This was the final result of our consolidation. As you see last month every time we have an overbooking of our resources also for the next three months and after this consolidation so we talk about 21 FTE related to a year we can show as soon as possible with the data also from Tempus that we reduce our workload from something around 130 percent to under 100 to 93 and that is the result of the consolidation and we can show it nearly in real time with Tempus Resource.
So, I hope that was interesting and I could give you a good look into our doing from Deloitte IT in Germany and that helps you to find a decision to Tempus Resource or what Marc told to better
Processes and so on.
Thank you, Elmar. And to wrap up, that was beautiful to see how an IT being a cost center
before, so you can just leave the presentation on for maybe another minute. To see how the IT developed itself because I see it in so many organizations because the business units, they just don’t understand why the IT isn’t able and capable to do more and more and more. Now the IT is able to display in order with the FTE already consumed with each business unit and answer the question why isn’t it possible because we already had these things going on especially for you guys, so this is why the IT became a partner rather than just the cost center. So these figures really interesting and a lot of benefit from that.
Elmar, if you go to the next two slides we have maybe 2 minutes what the future goals are. The first one is what you always have to keep in mind having a resource management in place to keep up with user acceptance continuously asking stakeholders how you could further optimize sides, process and tool. The team will now go towards a multi-dimensional skill matrix so the roles or the skills will be further developed. This is the current next goal set. The business units now tend to understand more about resource management and what the benefit is and they start to adapt what the IT did as kind of a role model and of course something we all have in mind already, something already spoken about, resource management over maybe utilizing resources across many departments, even locations what tends to be the answer for the future. If you have a shortage of resource capacities and skills to look not only into other divisions, other locations like nationally but globally.
So this is the maybe the last slide, the last one Elmar. We will share any slides so you can read through them. This is a Deloitte slide, the idea of the global RPM to leverage a common resource pool in order to have a centralized initiation phase to understand redundancy, to generate synergies as well as to leverage a common skill and pool of resources.
So this is pretty much it. Thank you for your attention and I hand over back to Greg. Thank you, Elmar.
