A global leader in cancer care with 5500+ highly trained healthcare professionals and support staff across Australia, the UK, Spain, and the United States and more than 440 treatment centers internationally needed to establish a global IT Investment and Portfolio Management function to manage growing customer demand.

The global PMO would be responsible for ensuring the company invested in the right IT projects with the right resources and extracted the maximum value for those investments. The global PMO would also manage the enterprise’s portfolio of programs and projects, partnering with IT product owners and business sponsors to ensure projects are assessed, planned, and executed to deliver business value.

The CIO and Senior Vice President of the Global PMO requested Emerald One’s help in establishing the strategic planning and governance framework and processes required to identify, triage, prioritize, and plan for new initiatives and potential projects.

Emerald One provided PMO subject matter expertise, designed systematic initiative intake and prioritization, developed investment decision criteria, established a strategic governance framework, and conducted a program/project management health assessment.

We analyzed and assessed the current IT investment prioritization processes against the project backlog and developed a three-phase IT investment management strategy: 1) build a foundation, 2) stabilize processes, and 3) iterate and improve. Emerald One designed a strategic planning process using industry standards and organization-specific priorities to review and approve new IT projects and integrate them with enterprise-level investment governance processes. Following the assessment, we recommended a final fiscal year IT portfolio of projects, then designed and helped implement a sustainable governance structure.

Emerald One developed and implemented standard portfolio, program, and project management tools to increase automation and promote transparency. Emerald One designed and launched a standard project request intake process to gather new customer requests. Emerald One established standard project management templates for schedules, work breakdown structures, issues and risk management, and resource management. Finally, Emerald One developed and launched a program health assessment tool to assess the baseline maturity of the company’s program management practices and competencies and track progress over time.

Outcome

Emerald One empowered the company to actively operate its first-ever strategic IT portfolio investment framework and evaluation process to intake, triage, and prioritize IT-enabled initiatives. This new rigor helped consolidate the IT project portfolio by 10 percent. IT leadership increased its involvement in prioritizing requests against available resources, budget, and business objectives. The data-driven tools and assessment for portfolio and program management increased the consistency of reporting across the IT portfolio of projects and streamlined reporting requirements, providing leadership with a single source of actionable information on project risks and status.