Global Medical Device Manufacturer
Background
App Maisters was approached by a Fortune 500 company specializing in Medical Device Manufacturing to turn their data into visual information using PowerBI. The device manufacturer has presence in over 80 countries. The organization had set up Project Management Operations PMO in last few years to provide oversight of the device making projects.
At any point of time, the business is engaged in anywhere between 15 to 20 projects. Their projects can have resources from up to 18 different departments. The projects can run anywhere between 8 months to 24 months. The business reviews their portfolio once a year and the leadership approves projects during that time.
Objective
As is the situation in most multinational organizations, the company uses multiple systems to perform unique operations. Resource management system is different from project management with no direct links in place. The product commercialization arm uses another system which is not linked to the Project Management system.
The First problem is that of information reconciliation followed by understanding the needs of all stakeholders who will view the visualized information.
Key business objective was to leverage available data to identify what all can be done to run projects on time. Key reasons for project delays were lack of resource availability from some departments. These departments had very technical resources who are not easily available globally. This issue was identified by AppMaisters while developing BRD.
Approach
In order to boil down the problem, App Maisters created a good Business Requirements Document (BRD) working in close collaboration with client’s Single Point of Contact (SPOC). The document listed the stakeholders, system personas and their key needs as well as elaborated the key business drivers.
Once the BRD was signed off, App Maisters worked on identifying possible ways to extract and reconcile the data from various source systems.
Special attention was given to understand the current system of resource allocation.
Once the data was analysed, it was concluded that there are multiple projects that need resources almost at the same time.
Solution
Based on analysis, it was concluded that right information was missing through project approval and execution. App Maisters recommended availability of some information at the time of project approvals. Based on information that was provided, all the projects were following a semi bell shaped curve. If all resource needs were mapped over time, it was easy to see that many of projects needed resources at the same time. So a visual which would show resource allocation through the project based on availability of the resources was a clear business need.
App Maisters team, working with the client, came up with 5 such high level visuals which would turn Reporting Tool into Decision Support Tool. For each high level visual, additional discussion created 2 to 3 additional visuals./p>
Conclusion
Business Intelligence projects, if just seen as tool to create visuals, tend to lose interest and do not add much value, if root cause of business need is not carried out.
