Home > Customers > Case Studies

Case Studies

Financial Services

 The Client

UK Based financial services group, with a very large international presence in Europe, the USA, Africa and Asia. It is engaged primarily in banking, investment banking and investment management. Established over 300 years, it operates in over 60 countries with more than 78,000 employees.

 What they needed:

After re-entering the African market in 1995 as a fully licensed subsidiary of the UK parent the organisation expanded rapidly - and is still growing. Now with headquarters in Johannesburg it operates in ten territories including Pretoria, Cape Town, and Durban with much of the IT operational hub located in Zimbabwe. The organisation needed to establish a consistent approach to project planning and control across all offices in Africa. In addition to this, the internal African telecommunications infrastructure was unreliable to support a 100% web based solution.

Existing systems were disparate with MSP being used for planning, ABT for resourcing, Excel for resource requests and other tools for reporting. This was causing a number of issues; not enough visibility of progress against plan; time capture separate from the plan causing inaccurate updates; resource allocation was at summary level not plan level causing resource conflicts; project slippage was not visible early enough; adding additional work could not be easily assessed; cost management was manual and taken after the event – the overall system was too manual in nature.

 What we provided:

Hydra Management provided consultancy and software solutions including Hydra Manager for Program, project and resource planning, Hydra Personal for integrated time capture and distribution of personal plans, bespoke reporting and the facility to use remote working across various African regions.

 The Benefits:

The Hydra solution gave the organisation a management system that supports the pre-inception, development and roll-out of substantial programs of work, effectively utilising scarce resource and allowing senior management the opportunity to pre-plan and optimise the ongoing activities whilst overcoming the technical constraints of the regions.

Retail Distribution

 The Client

One of the world’s largest business-to-business suppliers of essential office and computer products and services with 2004 sales of approximately $4.5 billion in North America. Product offerings range from office and computer supplies; imaging and computer graphic supplies; office furniture to document and print management. Operations in Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Germany, Hungary, Ireland, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Poland, Sweden, United Kingdom and the United States. North American operations have more than 200 facilities including 38 distribution centres, and employs over 10,000 people.

 What they needed:

"We wanted effective communication between IT and the rest of the business" – vice president of software engineering and implementation. "We needed aligned priorities and personnel working on the same parts of the business at the same time. To do this we needed complete integration of all plans and a standard approach to planning & tools."

 What we provided:

Hydra Management provided consultancy and software solutions including Hydra Manager for program, project and resource management, Hydra Personal for integrated time recording and distribution of personal plans. The solution is run as an ASP service minimising in-house hardware infrastructure and support staff.

 The Benefits:

The organisation has complete resource activity visibility, an overview of all resource loading, improved integrated project planning. "Hydra provides strategic planning and we can instantly see whether we have the resources to justify the project" – director of programme management. "We are already planning for a 10% increase in management productivity by year end"

HiTec Manufacturing

 The Client

A world leader in professional markets, in which it offers display and visualisation solutions. Based upon in-depth market knowledge, the company designs and develops solutions for large screen visualisation, display solutions for life-critical applications, and systems for visual inspection.

Headquartered in Belgium, it has its own facilities for Sales and Marketing, Customer Support, R&D and Manufacturing in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. Worldwide the organisation employs more than 4200 people and realised sales close to euro 630 million in 2003.

 What they needed:

"Our biggest issue was efficiently managing resources and multiple resource pools across multiple projects. Within the organisation we have multiple project teams each working on several projects sometimes with personnel loaned between groups. It was difficult to fully understand each team’s project status, resource loading and future availability to support new projects "

 What we provided:

Hydra Management provided the Hydra solution for; managing multiple projects across the organisation; managing resource pools with the ability to loan resources from one pool to another, or direct to projects; what if analysis to analyse the impact of the take on of new work; visibility across all project resource utilisation.

 The Benefits:

"Without the proper tools it is common to over or under commit on projects. When over committed, project dates are not met; slipped projects have a compounding affect throughout the organisation causing inefficiencies in other groups as they react to the delay. However, by adopting Hydra we have seen a reduction in project timescales and improvements in the number of projects meeting their deliverables". – Technology Director

Back to top

Local Authority

 The Client

UK City Council – The council is a unitary authority established by the Local Government Act of 1972 and it is responsible for providing all the local government services within its area except for Police, Fire and Transport. The City’s profile is one shared with many other similar authorities and comprises:
• An inner city
• Areas of primarily residential development
• A rural area – over 21% of the city is designated green belt land

The City has a population of 230,000 people and covers an area of over 9,900 hectares. The Council has 11,000 employees and is organised for operational purposes into eight directorates.

 What they needed:

The council was at the forefront of promoting the adoption of best practice in Project Management within the City Councils Corporate Services IT Services Division. Through the creation back in 2001 of a Project Support office and the development of a City Council Project Management Methodology, based on Prince2, the importance of Project Management in being a driving force behind the successful delivery of a wide range of customer centric ICT Programmes and Projects, supporting both the E-Government targets and the ongoing continuous ICT improvements to existing service delivery was being realised. They needed to build on their Project Management and Project delivery successes and to bind a mixture of manual and semi automated processes into a fully automated, structured Program and Project Collaboration environment. Some of the issues they were facing:

• Not all IT Business Units had accepted the need for improved project based working methods to the same degree
• Not all ICT Projects are managed using the Council Methodology
• New business was still finding a way into Development by the ‘back door’
• Disparate collaboration methods and tools made it difficult to produce the right quality of management reports at a level to easily track program and project progress
• The current time recording system was out of date and not used across all business units making it impossible to accurately monitor resource costs
• Lack of central resource pools and skills made it difficult to easily manage a consolidated programme of work and plan ahead
• Project document storage was labour intensive and prone to errors

 What we provided:

Hydra Management has provided Hydra Manager for improved project and program costing, accurate management reporting and full drill down facilities from program to project to personal plans. Hydra Personal is being implemented for integrated personal planning and time recording, which allows the automatic updating of project plans (and in turn program plans). Hydra Collaborator will be rolled out across the community to enable project and program management collaboration and improved document management. The Council will be looking at Hydra Executive in a later phase to address Benefits Management and Project & Program Management Selection.

 The Benefits:

The Hydra solution is expected to provide the following major benefits:

• To foster collaborative project based working across all the IT business units
• Ensure the timely provision of more accurate management reporting
• Improved management of IT resources
• Provide the ability to easily expand its use as the take up of the Council Project Management Methodology extends across the organisation
• Improved Program and Project financial monitoring, forecasting and reporting
• Improved Document Management facilities
• Drill down from Program to project level to report across a range of projects
• Provide the ability to forecast and track ROI
• Pre defined report library and report generation tools
• Links to Project Costing and Accounting Systems
• Effectively manage program and project investment

Back to top