IT Change Portfolio Support

Our client is a leading global provider of professional assurance services that help businesses manage risk, improve sustainability, and achieve their goals. With a globally known brand name, it is a trusted partner to a diverse range of clients in over 120 countries worldwide.

Our client operates in a wide range of industries, including aerospace, automotive, food and beverage, healthcare, and more. Their services include certification, training, assessment, and verification, which are designed to help organisations operate more efficiently and effectively.

With a global network of over 6,000 employees and contingent workers, our client has a wealth of expertise and knowledge to help their clients achieve their goals.

Challenge

With the client IT team thinly spread following a prolonged period of fast-moving and intense activity (including separation, value creation, and acquisitions alongside business-as-usual change requests), there was an urgent need for the IT function to form a refreshed and more complete view of the current portfolio and its connection with the needs of the wider business in terms of demand, including what was budgeted, what was on the backlog, what is addressed by internal vs. external resources, and how the initiatives were funded and managed.

Solution

Our primary objective was to create a single source of truth regarding technology change through the creation of a portfolio inventory that was repeatable and manageable for the client moving forwards. We approached this through first interviewing a wide range of senior stakeholders across business, technology, and transformation over an intense two-week period to rapidly ascertain details of:

• Demand backlog
• Visibility and process pain points
• Technology platform roadmaps
• Separation activity support
• In flight transformation projects

We then ensured that gathering this information would be a repeatable process and identified attributes needed to be assigned to change to help effectively categorise, prioritise, and plan future change across technology.

We plotted the change initiatives into dashboard views and a timeline per business unit and function, providing a cohesive view of when change was planned, highlighting where there were risks and gaps, due to numerous factors such as resource contention, capacity constraints and previously invisible dependencies between initiatives.  This enabled the CDIO and leadership team to easily digest and monitor technology change.

We provided recommendations going forward addressing data quality and control mechanisms that were needed to improve how demand was captured, governance and visibility and ensuring that hidden costs were eliminated and more rigorous spend tracking. As part of the recommendations, we provided a documented process for tracking the portfolio and associated accountabilities for the portfolio inventory owner and technology leads to enable a continual improvement and refinement of portfolio management.

Outcome

These outcomes highlighted the necessity of taking action to gain control of the portfolio change and ensure that change demand was being properly evaluated. Proving insights and data sources, the CDIO and leadership team were provided with the analysis, insights and tools to effectively monitor and manage technology change, leading to the potential for enhanced decision-making, streamlined processes, and optimised resource allocation and cost management.

If you would like to speak to one of our industry experts regarding this case study, email contact@masonadvisory.com. Find out more about our services.