How does a large enterprise cultivate a single source of truth across teams, departments, continents, and solutions? Planview enlisted not one, but two global Fortune 500 customers to tell their transformation stories during a “Fireside Chat: Power of Having One Single Source of Truth.” Each company is a trailblazer in evolving PPM to meet stakeholder needs and achieve strategic objectives.
Planview’s Chief Product Officer, Louise Allen, moderated an engaging, in-depth conversation with these customers:
- Hiren Shah – Johnson & Johnson – Global Finance Transformation, Sr. Portfolio Director
- Mark Wybraniec – Johnson & Johnson – Portfolio Management Organization, Director
- Allan Spina – Becton Dickinson – Portfolio Management and Innovation Education, VP R&D
Both companies sought to streamline data and reporting while empowering their stakeholders, using a centralized enterprise PPM solution. High-level goals were to facilitate informed decision-making and support the different ways teams and individuals are working, such as Agile, Scrum, collaborative work, and others.
Here is a synopsis of the discussion, followed by the group’s answers to a few compelling questions attendees asked during the webcast.
J&J’s Global Finance Transformation
Hiren and Mark of Johnson & Johnson (J&J) discussed their work on the company’s Global Finance Transformation project. With more than 7,500 people in four regions across the globe, Finance’s biggest pain point was indeed no single source of truth for business and IT.
With such a massive transformation program, and everyone executing in a different manner, their main consideration was: “How do we bring everyone to a consistent platform and have the data to enable effective decision making?”
Becton Dickinson: Marrying Apples and Skyscrapers
Allan Spina of Becton Dickinson discussed his initiative perpetuated by two large acquisitions over several years. His mandate from executive management was to consolidate three different Planview PPM instances and environments from each organization (CareFusion, C.R. Bard, and Becton Dickinson) into one single source of truth with Planview Portfolios.
Since each company configured the software differently, Allan likened the endeavor impacting 6,000 employees across six time zones to “marrying apples and skyscrapers.” His goal was to provide the right information at the right time to drive insight, actions, and decisions for all stakeholders – from project teams to the board of directors.
The full discussion is a rare opportunity to hear directly from each company about undertaking challenges and achieving success. In the meantime, the following Q&A section provides more context around each company’s transformation journey and how they handled it.
Webinar Q&A (all answers paraphrased)
1. What kind of systems did you phase out or consolidate? How did you retire them?
Allan: We determined what each business unit was trying to accomplish and took a minimum viable product approach. In other words, we outlined which elements of the PPM tool that they were required to use. We moved 800 active projects from disparate, older tools, such as MS Project Server, into the new PPM solution.
Hiren: Finance did not have an existing PPM tool (our IT partners did), but we have multiple portfolios in our program. Our approach was crawl, walk, run to gain our single source of truth. For smaller portfolios, we did not make all capabilities mandatory. For the biggest and most impactful portfolios, we wanted to implement everything.
2. Do you have any insight or examples on ROI? How do you prove the value of the PPM software?
Mark: Our challenge was transitioning people away from spreadsheets, Word, PowerPoint, and other tools for reporting. We had to sell the teams on the power of centralization and standardization. “Push button get report” has always been our objective.
The ROI was saving people time so they can focus on the bigger picture and value-add activities, not administrative items. We have significantly measured how much time has been reduced by teams. When you multiply that across an organization as vast and diverse as ours, the hours add up quite a bit.
3. How did you foster change within the organization and adoption of the PPM solution?
Allan: We put together a cross-functional global team to represent our core stakeholders and asked them: “What are your current challenges and what would you do to optimize what you do and how you work?”
This gave them skin in the game. They provided a lot of input and helped identify the common thread of capabilities. In short order, they were driving us to get it done on their behalf.
Mark: The change management journey was critical for us. Our VPs have been engaged in the journey from day one and see the value on literally a daily basis. That was truly the difference that has made this successful.
Our global engagement was also a key factor. We started experimenting early and getting our groups involved. They appreciated this and said thank you for engaging with us and asking our opinion instead of throwing this at us.
4. Where is Kanban fitting in from a planning, work management, and agile perspective in terms of what you are doing today and future planning?
Hiren: We have a gamut of types of projects that we execute, especially because of our size and complexity. For example, we have over 70+ ERPs and a lot of projects that are still executed in an old-fashioned method. Portfolios is our single source of truth. Some groups are working in Planview AgilePlace, and the PMO is starting to pilot it.
Mark: Connecting the data is critical because we have to support the complexities of our tools and different ways of working, especially now that we are moving to Agile methodologies and a Squad structure. We use Jira as the consolidation layer to see all the work together. Having a flexible framework of managing work in Jira or Planview AgilePlace or Portfolios and having the data roll up, that’s the key.
Allan: One of our main questions was: What do we do with people who still use MS Project and Project Server? We use native Tasktop embedded tools to connect those projects with Portfolios. This approach reduces double entry of data, and it’s always the same. Another component is how the teams want to work, whether it be Scrum or Kanban. Highly structured Scrum teams or teams of teams use Planview AgilePlace. Smaller collaborative teams use
5. What is your one piece of advice for success?
Allan: Determine what matters most and matters least, and jettison things that don’t matter. If you are not getting value and insights that lead you to make informed decisions, get rid of it. You don’t need it.
Hiren: Enablement, Enablement, Enablement. Think from your stakeholder’s point of view and how can you help make them successful.
Mark: It’s all about engagement with the community and listening to what’s working and what’s not. Then being agile and flexible enough to make a change and experiment to add value.
Allan may have summed up the discussion best when he said: “It’s a stellar lift to go to a single source of truth across three organizations and different ways of working, with one set of visualizations and management approach that meets all stakeholder needs and values.”
