Consistency and visibility are crucial to running a business, providing an avenue for making well-informed decisions. However, many companies continue to be limited in both areas, overwhelmed by vast amounts of data. RBS understands this struggle, having relied on spreadsheets and multiple project and portfolio management tools with different information. This blog is a summary of the RBS story and their achievements after implementing Planview Enterprise.
About RBS
RBS is a UK-based banking and financial services company, established in 1727 and headquartered in Edinburgh. RBS provides a wide range of products and services to personal, commercial, and large corporate and institutional customers through its two main subsidiaries, The Royal Bank of Scotland and NatWest, as well as through a number of other well-known brands including Ulster Bank and Coutts. RBS serves over 30 million customers globally.
Challenge: Inconsistent and Incomplete Data
With so many brands, RBS required a complex data integration. Sajad Shah, Program Manager at RBS, was tasked with finding a technology solution that would help consolidate project and PPM tools and establish a single source of truth that could be leveraged for critical business decisions.
“We had 20 business areas, each with their own PPM tool,” says Shah. “Hundreds of users had joint projects they were managing in their own systems. Nothing was integrated, we had a fractured enterprise and bank-wide investment governance framework, and inconsistent and incomplete data.”
RBS was trying to manage information and metrics in hundreds of spreadsheets, user-developed tools, multiple templates, and with too many support teams. The inefficiencies were driving bad data, which, in turn, drove misguided decisions. RBS also experienced challenges in ongoing organization changes at RBS, and large, diverse, and siloed stakeholder groups.
Solution: Data Consistency and Reliability Using One PPM Solution
RBS narrowed the field of PPM vendors based on functionality, reporting capabilities, user experience, and cost benefits. “Planview was chosen unanimously,” recalls Shah. “It wasn’t just the technology but the people at Planview that shaped our decision. I have led many implementations around the world, but the Planview Enterprise implementation is one I consider the most successful because our achievements were remarkable.”
The Planview Enterprise SaaS model sped up delivery and eliminated the need for RBS to manage an infrastructure. Within months, a small internal team, along with a group of
Planview consultants were able to retire dozens of legacy systems that drained resources and move 12,000 active users to Planview Enterprise, from the Board level to the manager level. In fact, Planview Enterprise is now the single system of record and is plumbed throughout the RBS enterprise strategic architecture.
Today, Planview Enterprise is being used for this year’s investment budgeting process. RBS management and board members depend on the data from Planview Enterprise to monitor enterprise-wide investment spend and to make strategic decisions.
“We achieved all of our goals, and the benefits we realized using Planview Enterprise have exceeded our expectations,” says Shah. “We finally have a grip on our data regarding financials, resource demand, and supply. This is the type of data transparency that leaders need to make decisions and help us achieve our goals to reduce costs.”
Benefits:
Since implementing Planview Enterprise, RBS has:
- A single enterprise and bank-wide tool that replaced and decommissioned 35 legacy systems, 50+ user-developed tools, and hundreds of spreadsheets
- Consistent, reliable data and reports to inform financial and resource decisions
- Quantifiable results such as significantly reduced costs in each business area
- Non-quantifiable results such as improved transparency, added controls, data consistency, simplified architecture, project hierarchy and framework, and standardized reporting
- Delivered on business case, benefits, and ROI within 12 months
The RBS story is a great example of how Planview Enterprise can benefit an entire organization by providing a single point of truth. Download the full case study PDF for more information. Do you relate to the challenges RBS faced? Comment below how you are improving your organization.
