Portfolio Management Business Process Redesign

The Business Process Re-Design Challenge

A large, global pharmaceutical firm wanted to transition its IT portfolio management process from an annual event to an active, ongoing part of an IT managers' daily workflow. The IT organization consisted of a number of infrastructure and business facing operating units with several thousand IT staff distributed throughout the world.

The management of these operating units was decentralized and each operating unit had significantly different portfolio management processes. Senior executives needed to gain agreement from the IT managers in the different operating units about the long-term value of changing the portfolio management process. IT managers also needed to agree to the design of a common portfolio management process that satisfied the different requirements of different operating divisions.

The Solution

Intellilink Solutions tailored the Change Management and Business Process Re-design components of its implementation methodology to address the diverse nature of the existing business processes, decision making autonomy of the operating units and the strong desire for independence of the IT managers in this organization.

Change Management - Developing a customized Change Management program began by working with a senior project sponsor to understand the agendas of each of the different project stakeholders. Following this stakeholder analysis we worked with the project sponsor to craft a clear message about the value to the organization of changing the current portfolio management business process. The message was communicated through a program of presentations to representatives from the different operating units that would be affected by future process changes. Each presentation was customized to address the needs and concerns of each operating unit while the message was consistent in explaining the value of the future process changes.

Importantly, while Intellilink worked closely with the project sponsor to design the message to be communicated, the project sponsor actually delivered the message to the users. The project sponsor"s visibility and his personal commitment to the project and change process were crucial to gaining buy-in from users.

Business Process Re-Design - Intellilink consultants designed the structure of a series of process re-design workshops and then facilitated the delivery of the workshops to different user groups.

For each workshop Intellilink consultants developed a software prototype to illustrate how business processes could be changed to make project portfolio management a more dynamic process. The prototype was built around a number of business cases using real portfolio projects and real data provided by the organization. The prototype showcased a number of re-designed business processes and gave the users an opportunity to work through the business cases to gain an understanding of how the new processes would be expected to work.

Importantly, requirements gathered during the first round of prototype workshops were incorporated into revised business cases. The users were given an opportunity to gain further hands on experience with the prototype to see how their recommendations had been incorporated into the new business processes. From the outset Intellilink consultants recognized that quickly incorporating user feedback into new iterations of the prototype was critical to maintaining user interest and buy-in to the change program.