Overseeing all projects with clear visibility into progress, invoices and funding plans. One year after adopting Planisware, 84% of the Ministry's projects had a funding plan, up from 40%.
In IT in particular, how do you choose the right projects and keep them under control in terms of cost and schedule? The question has long preoccupied Michel Monneret, Deputy Director of Information Systems at the French Ministry of National Education.
The requests we receive come from central government departments, which are only the commissioning bodies and do not bear the budgets.
To do this, it is essential to structure them, steer them, and monitor the dashboards.
A few figures
- 1,145,300 staff employed by the national education system
- 870,900 teachers in schools and secondary institutions
- 61,900 schools and secondary institutions
- €154.6 billion in expenditure
Context and challenges
Like the vast majority of organizations, public or private, the Ministry's Information Systems Department had until then been using a configured Excel spreadsheet and the MS Project (Microsoft) application dedicated to the project manager. But when many different contributors work together, enter and track time spent, and when management has to arbitrate and precisely assess costs, resources and return on investment, a standard application is no longer effective.
Every team is convinced its own request is the most important. That is why a thorough analysis of projects is necessary, so they can be prioritized and so we do not approve those that are secondary and costly.
For Michel Monneret, only a dedicated software package, a shared portfolio management tool, is capable of overseeing all projects with clear visibility into work progress, invoice status and funding plans. And of ensuring budget control within a common framework that evaluates and compares, which is increasingly required by public accounting rules.
The Planisware Orchestra solution
The request for proposal was launched in 2012. At the time, most of the bidders were Anglo-American vendors, such as Compuware (ChangePoint), CA (Clarity), IBM (Rational Focal Point), SciForma (PS Next) and Artemis. In the end, however, it was a French solution that won the contract.
"We proposed an original solution, extremely configurable and perfectly suited to the Ministry's setup, for which we had already tested a small project in 2007", highlights Gilles Lavalou, VP at Planisware.
Since then, Orchestra has won over several local authorities (the city councils of Villeurbanne, Nevers, Orléans and others), the Ministry of Culture, State agencies (Anap), hospitals (Montluçon) and universities (Toulouse 1, Tours, Orléans).
UGAP (Union des Groupements d'Achats Publics | France's National Public Procurement Agency) lists the solution in its catalogue, and the public sector accounts for two thirds of the 200 current customers. The benefits are significant in terms of productivity gains. What used to require several people for reporting (retrieving and consolidating data) is now done continuously by the users themselves. And a project kept under control in cost and schedule is always more economical.
How they use it
Won over by the product's flexibility, Michel Monneret opted for a high-level view. He wants to support change and help Ministry staff move into a project-based way of working.
Not only does the public sector require some adaptations, but we also had our own requirements. Demand management, for example: we needed to be able to route requests issued by the contracting authority to the IT department, so that it could arbitrate and, where appropriate, move the request into a pre-project and then a project phase. As this process is specific to our organization, Orchestra had to adapt.
Installed on a server, the application uses web resources in SaaS mode, but could just as easily run in the cloud. Several interfaces with the information system are possible: with directories, time tracking and financial management (budget monitoring), for example.
We needed to be able to route requests issued by the contracting authority to the IT department, so that it could arbitrate and, where appropriate, move the request into a pre-project and then a project phase.
One year after implementation, the results are there: of 11 projects running late in the first quarter of 2013, all but one were back on track by early 2014. Today, 84% of projects have a funding plan, whereas in September 2013 the figure was only 40 to 45%.
The monthly schedule review, which now brings together department heads, deputy directors and the head of service of the Digital Directorate for Education, ensures precise monitoring of the work undertaken before going further.
This is illustrated by the Ardèche departmental council, which, after deploying Orchestra for road management, is now extending it to IT department projects.
Source : sipublic.info – Gestion de projet : l’appli dédiée de l’Education nationale.
