Celerity drives business transformation through program and portfolio management services

Challenge: Celerity’s client sought to establish a Results Management Office (RMO) for a multi-year business transformation initiative spanning organizational roles and responsibilities, business processes, and technology capabilities. The client needed to quickly put a structure in place to capture and track budgets, resources and progress on over 100 projects supporting this initiative. Additionally, portfolio level reporting and governance processes needed to be established to provide transparency to executives and ensure proper controls.

Solution: Celerity developed and maintained frameworks, templates, and processes for Project Integration Management, Portfolio Reporting, Governance, and Resource Management. Initially, Celerity developed a centralized project database and an inter-project/program dependency tracking tool from which all portfolio reporting was derived. Leveraging this data, Celerity monitored project progress for the status of critical path milestones and included this status in weekly executive level reporting. Additionally, Celerity established processes for cross-portfolio resource forecasting, project/program status reporting, and project funding approvals. Finally, Celerity documented all processes and owned the communications and training of these and other critical processes supporting the initiative to the client’s project management community.

Results: Celerity provided the client with multi-dimensional views of project data and a clear, concise picture of budget, progress and status for all projects supporting the initiative. In addition, the processes established by Celerity ensured effective executive oversight, governance and downstream impact identification and resolution for key scope, schedule, resource, and budget changes. As a final step in the engagement, Celerity trained client resources in order to ensure sustainability of the Results Management Office going forward.

 

Celerity establishes a PMO to oversee and manage the development & implementation of a third party solution

Challenge: As a result of the mortgage crisis, Celerity’s client required new technology to handle increased housing foreclosure volume. The client selected a new single integrated platform provided by a third party to support Traditional Sales, Asset Management Providers, and Alternative Disposition strategies. The client selected Celerity to establish program management capabilities over the initiative due to the complexity of the initiative, numerous constituencies involved and the market drivers demanding expeditious action.

Solution: To manage the development and implementation of the new platform, Celerity established a program office and served as a liaison between the business, technology and external constituencies to ensure close alignment between the teams. Celerity coordinated activities across all workstreams and provided the necessary leadership to resolve issues and drive business critical decisions. In addition, Celerity assigned business analysts, project managers and UAT leads to the various workstreams to support the implementation of the third party solution and deployment of the tool to users.

Results: Celerity’s success was the result of strong leadership, hard work, patience and the ability to manage and align the interests of multiple groups from the clients business and technology divisions, the product vendor and external constituents. Through the program management office, Celerity was able to coordinate, integrate, monitor, and report on business and technology activities. The PMO increased the effectiveness of the new platform implementation by creating a structure to gather information from various workstreams and synthesize business and technology-related information for sound decision-making.