ADNOC is one of the top ten oil producers in the world, employing around 50,000 people across more than 70 group companies. Before its transformation, project and portfolio data sat in silos, spread across different systems, often producing conflicting reported numbers for the same projects. This fragmentation made it difficult to drive efficiency, reduce costs, and support ADNOC's sustainability ambitions at scale.
About ADNOC and Project Light
ADNOC is one of the top ten oil producers in the world, employing around 50,000 people across more than 70 group companies. Before its transformation, project and portfolio data sat in silos, spread across different systems, often producing conflicting reported numbers for the same projects. This fragmentation made it difficult to drive efficiency, reduce costs, and support ADNOC's sustainability ambitions at scale.
Project Light is ADNOC's transformation program designed to "do more for less," with a clear mandate: increase efficiency, reduce costs, and support sustainability while creating a single source of truth for project data across all group companies. Planisware sits at the heart of this mission, serving as the common platform to harmonize project portfolio management for the entire organization. Tiago Hipolito, Strategy Implementation Manager for Project Light, is responsible for steering this transformation and ensuring alignment across ADNOC's entities.
From Pilot to Enterprise-Wide Adoption
ADNOC began implementing Planisware in 2018, and Tiago joined the team in 2020 to accelerate adoption across the group companies. At that point, the platform was managing just 10 projects. The goal was to scale dramatically, and fast.
The COVID period became an unexpected accelerator. Before remote work, the team could barely cover two companies per day, traveling between sites. With everyone on Microsoft Teams, they delivered approximately 250 virtual training sessions in just nine months, four in the morning and four in the afternoon, reaching thousands of users consistently and at a pace across the group.
To embed this adoption operationally, ADNOC created local PMO teams, called RVT PMOs, in each of its 14 group companies, placing portfolio management expertise close to the business. A dedicated team of Planisware developers and consultants worked exclusively with ADNOC, running agile one-week sprints covering development, testing, support, and planning. Within nine months, the platform went from 10 to over 2,000 projects.
Impact: Thousands of Projects, Billions in Savings
Today, Project Light manages more than 2,000 projects within Planisware, covering a portfolio of strategic and operational initiatives across ADNOC's entities. The transformation has contributed to billions in savings, a direct result of consolidated, reliable project data and standardized practices across the group.
ADNOC has also eliminated paper entirely from its project processes, moving to digital workflows and approvals supported by Planisware. Most importantly, the organization now operates with a single source of truth for project and portfolio information, replacing the earlier landscape of silos and conflicting numbers.
As Tiago puts it: "2,000 projects, zero papers, billions saved, single source of truth - and everyone happy."
Integrating AIDT: Standardization Meets Flexibility
In March 2024, ADNOC's Group CEO launched a new entity called AIDT (Artificial Intelligence, Digital and Technology), to drive a step-change in efficiency through technology. The platform of choice was the same Planisware instance already running Project Light. The challenge: the year had already started, with defined rules, roles, and workflows in place for Project Light that couldn't simply be replicated for a new program with different needs.
Tiago and his team worked in parallel under the same platform, building dedicated workflows, templates, and rules specifically for AIDT and by September 2024, the program was live with over 2,000 initiatives loaded across the group companies. It was, in Tiago's words, "pretty chaotic," but the strength of the team and the Planisware partnership carried it through.
By the end of 2024, the team had designed a unified structure to serve both programs from 2025 onward: a single workflow, aligned rules, and the same validation stakeholders for both. This experience reinforced a key learning for ADNOC: standardization and flexibility can coexist — as long as the core model is strong and governance is clear.
Shifting from Custom Workflows to Standard Features
Since 2022, ADNOC has been on a gradual journey away from custom-built workflows toward Planisware's standard features. Highly customized configurations had created complexity, with a significant testing burden every time changes or upgrades were needed. Moving toward the standard product reduces this overhead and positions ADNOC to benefit automatically from new capabilities as they are released.
This shift also supports better user adoption, as users interact with a more streamlined and predictable system. Standardization makes it easier to scale Planisware to additional entities like AIDT and lays the groundwork for a future SaaS migration by aligning with out-of-the-box capabilities rather than maintaining a large custom footprint.
2026: Preparing for the Biggest Leap Yet
For ADNOC, 2026 represents the most significant step in five years of the Planisware journey. The upcoming changes are substantial: a new interface, a new technology engine, AI capabilities, a new reporting engine, and advanced analytics, a system that will look and feel very different to users. Cross-company maturity is now visible, with PMO teams across entities actively helping each other, sharing practices, and reinforcing adoption.
To prepare 50,000 people for this shift, ADNOC is investing heavily in enablement: an e-learning platform for self-service training, short "flash" trainings tailored to roles and tied to specific deadlines, and a PMO certification program to deepen capabilities. Workflows are being simplified to reduce unnecessary approvals and automate validations where possible, while five quarterly trainings, an expanded change team, and early PMO engagement in each phase ensure the entire organization is ready to embrace the next generation of Planisware-powered project portfolio management.
