IT Resource Tracking Automation

The Business Process Redesign Challenge

A global pharmaceutical organization wanted to redesign and automate its’ resource tracking and planning process. Before the creation of a portfolio management group, resource tracking was the responsibility of individual managers and limited information was available regarding the IT organization’s resource capacity and utilization. The portfolio management grouped introduced resource planning spreadsheets that were intended to be updated on a quarterly basis to measure the resource capacity of the organization and to be reviewed against the proposed project pipeline for resources.

The effort of manually consolidating ten different spreadsheets with inconsistent and erroneous data limited the process so that data consolidation could only be conducted on a quarterly basis. Data requirements for a strong IT Governance function required that resource tracking be conducted on a monthly interval.

The Solution

The portfolio management group had no control over data input; too many spreadsheets to consolidate and inconsistent data definitions (project names, resource roles) were used throughout the organization. Simple Excel templates failed to meet the needs of the organization, because they lacked security to ensure the correct data definitions were used and the multiple individual spreadsheets did not allow the portfolio management group to provide useful analysis of resource capacity and utilization in a timely manner.

Process Redesign - The resource planning process was redesigned to standardize controlled lists of projects, management activities, maintenance activities and roles across all departments within the organization. A monthly data update created complete snapshots of resource capacity within the organization.

Tool Creation – Intellilink developed a customized & cost effective application to support the resource tracking and planning process by utilizing Intuit’s QuickBase (TM) solution. The application allowed the portfolio management group to control the vocabulary used in the activity and role selection process. All project names, support activities, roles and personnel information changes were controlled by the portfolio management group. The application, being web-based, supported multiple users from all across the country and provided a single database of resource tracking and planning information. This prevented multiple versions of resource planning spreadsheets from existing and being confused with one another. The portfolio management group could actively enforce the timely entry of resource planning information and report the monthly resource requirements for the project and application portfolio.

Change Management - A complete Change Management program was developed to ensure buy-in from end users. Intellilink created scenario based training materials for each security role based on each roles’ responsibilities. “What is in it for me?” (WIIFM) sessions created marketing points for “selling” the new process and application to the end users. End users received training by live classroom or web-ex training seminars. In order to ensure compliance, short refresher courses were created to assist the end users with their monthly updates of the resource information.