BNP Paribas Personal Investors has overhauled the way it manages, monitors and evaluates technology projects. IT manager Benjamin Mourrat explains how it was done.

Back in 2007, BNP Paribas Personal Investors – the French bank’s personal investing and online trading arm – decided to address the inefficiencies, communication issues and duplications of effort which had encumbered the operations of its regional IT teams, particularly when it came to new developments and initiatives.

“There was no common way of managing technology projects, and there was not a lot of collaborative effort across our different regional operations, so some assets were produced twice in different countries,” says Benjamin Mourrat, IT corporate portfolio manager with BNP Paribas Personal Investors. “There was also no common methodology on how to actually plan teams out and evaluate efforts. This contributed to a number of discrepancies and ambiguities."

In response, the banking unit embarked on a strategic review of its technology operations with French technology consultancy Capgemini. The result was a decision to refresh its IT governance processes via the implementation of a modern project portfolio management (PPM) tool.

CA wins tender

A call for tender was made, and technology from SAP and Hewlett-Packard, among others, was considered. However, BNP Paribas Personal Investors eventually decided on a PPM system provided by CA Technologies. A prototype system was then built and tested over the following months, explains Mr Mourrat. “We needed to see if it would be beneficial to us, and ensure we were able to actually make use of the best practices supported by the tool in our organisation.”

After a positive conclusion to the testing period, the system was then implemented as part of a multistage project – completed in 2010 – across the unit's operations in Germany, France, Luxembourg and India. The benefits, Mr Mourrat says, are numerous.

The technology team can now take advantage of a repository holding all IT requests and demands from each of its operations, as well as data from all current and completed projects. This means that the PPM system can help calculate a planned venture’s viability, based on factors such as return on investment and strategic value. “We now have the same processes for everybody, involving all IT teams,” says Mr Mourrat. “We avoid wasting time and resources because we can make sure we have an agreement on the figures and an estimation of time and costs.”

Once a project has been approved, the PPM tool allows managers to benefit from an overall view of IT capacity and available resources. “We can check if there is budget available, and if we need to hire more people then we should know that in advance. And we won’t embark on the project if we don’t have the IT capacity to do it. It seems like a simple thing, but it is not always the case everywhere," says Mr Mourrat.

Greater transparency

It will also be easier for non-IT senior management to follow plans, and access figures and metrics on technology projects, Mr Mourrat adds, a feature which will be a boon for inter-departmental communication. “In the other business lines, people were always complaining about what people in IT were working on and asking what they were doing. Now we can tell them exactly what we are working on in terms of projects or maintenance. We can give them a clear view of what is being done by IT, and there are no more questions,” he says.

So far, the new PPM system has proven beneficial in both front- and back-end IT projects. It was crucial to the collaborative development of a recently introduced anti-money laundering tool, for example. It has also played a pivotal role in a push to improve the client web portal deployed in each country. Common needs between the different regional operations were identified, before a single project was undertaken. This resulted in significant cost savings for each individual operation. “We used the tool as a common platform to share things between geographically distinct teams working on the same project," says Mr Mourrat.

Even after a project has been completed, the data gathered by the PPM tool will still prove useful. A closure report is generated, which is used when considering new projects, Mr Mourrat says. “We now have figures and data which we didn’t have before, and making use of those is the best way to increase efficiencies in the future.”

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