Global Financial Services Giant

  • Using Intellify, from ThinkSmart Technologies, delivers enormous improvement in project and portfolio management across the globe for this organisation.

    For a global company with 1000’s of programmes 10,000’s of resources and 100’s of locations – ensuring the right skills, the correct resources, the best locations are used is a huge problem. Powered by Intellify the solution delivers optimal resourcing and planning, provides scenario modeling, and shows the consequential impact of changes in priority – all done in a dynamic manner.

    Resource optimisation, scheduling and planning delivers significant cost improvements and competitive advantages to this client.


    Case Study: Financial Services

    The Customer

    The customer is a Fortune 500 Global Financial Services company with over 20,000 IT professionals working on a variety of projects worldwide.

    The Problem

    The company has a difficult problem of managing up to 900 different projects each year with lots of complexity that includes skills, resource utilisation, location, budgets, deadlines, priorities and configuration of teams. Currently, there are many issues in scheduling and managing these projects around overruns, poor utilisation of resources, conflicts over allocation of resources and time differences across teams. The real difficulty that comes with this problem is that there are a large number of different types of constraints and preferences to accommodate – more than any individual could cope with in their head or using a spreadsheet. The result is that many improved projects schedules are ignored through lack of time and appropriate software tools – consequently the organisation is less than efficient, deadlines are missed and resources are wasted.

    ThinkSmart’s Solution

    ThinkSmart’s Intellify platform and its resource scheduling application were used as the basis for modelling the various complex aspects of the projects such as, people, skill type/level and location. The objective is to schedule as many projects as possible, while identifying where resources are best deployed and provide clear indication of the knock-on effect of any overruns that might happen. In addition, the solutions allows the company to adjust the sequence or priority of various projects and dynamically adjusts to the optimal schedule and highlights the consequential impacts (i.e. specific skill shortages, etc). ThinkSmart are working with an internal development group within the company and are providing the Intellify software platform plus key knowledge transfer to enable the organisation develop it into their own products. The key differentiator Intellify provides is the ability to take the model, and utilise a combination of different technologies to ensure optimal scheduling and allocation that respects business constraints (such as keeping key personnel together while also partnering people in the same geographical location.)

    Capability Provided

    ThinkSmart provides Scheduling and Optimisation capabilities for this company.

    Business Value Demonstrated

    The business benefits for the company are being evolved, however it is in trial within 3 major business divisions during 2011 where they are achieving significant resource improvements of up to 10% in key skill areas. The rate of on budget and on time project completions has also risen by 15%.