Case Studies
See how PPO helped leading industry players optimize their project portfolio management
The Client
With more than 73 years in the industry, Harmony is an emerging market gold mining specialist with a sizeable copper footprint.
Harmony is the largest gold producer in South Africa and also the largest producer of gold from the retreatment of old tailings dams, making the organisation a major player in the circular economy of gold. In 2020, the Information Services team recognised the need to establish an enterprise project management capability to deliver projects across a variety of disciplines within the business, such as time and attendance, human resources, risk management, ore resource management, and desktop projects.
The Challenge
The enterprise project management office (ePMO) faced the difficulty of having no real, objective way to measure the performance of their project managers. It was taking an excessive number of days for project completion, making delivery improvement one of the PMO’s key focus areas.
The PMO was using a tedious, manual method to measure the performance of its project managers and administrators, which was ultimately also a more subjective and emotional process. It became a priority, then, to find a better way to see project delivery statuses, identify project pain points and understand other influences on duration.
“Quite often, we found that information was very difficult to find and could even take the form of hand-written numbers. We wanted to digitalise and automate this paper-based procedure and manage it by exception, thus making it not only more efficient, but also more impartial.” Helga Olivier, Senior Manager, Group Technology: Projects
The Solution
The PMO had already been using Project Portfolio Office’s project and portfolio management solution, PPO, for several years, so it was a natural next step to see whether the tool could also be used to introduce a Project Manager Scorecard. Using PPO’s key performance indicator (KPI) reporting capability that allows PMOs to analyse performance trends and easily visualise and measure status of KPIs, the PMO was able to communicate (KPIs) and performance expectations to PMO staff members and align individual project manager performance with overall PMO and organisational goals in a structured and visual way.
“The Project Manager Scorecard needed to enhance communication, accountability and overall project management effectiveness.” Helga Olivier, Senior Manager, Group Technology: Projects
The Results
By implementing the automated Project Manager Scorecard, the ePMO has successfully saved 36 hours every month, which has improved operational efficiency by 25% and allowed the team to focus on more strategic tasks. The benefit for the project managers is that they now have clearer direction and guidelines. Not only does the PMO have a more consistent measurement process in place, but it also enables self-measurement for the project managers, which has led to healthy competition between PMO team members.
“We’re now able to use the Project Manager Scorecard as the basis of our weekly meeting reports, providing us with a succinct, real-time overview of project statuses. PPO has allowed the process of information collection for these discussions to be cut almost in half.” Helga Olivier, Senior Manager, Group Technology: Projects