Location
France
Activity area
Banking & Insurance
Company Overview
An affiliate of the Société Générale Group, Société Générale Algérie, was among the first private banks to set up shop in Algeria back in 2000.
With an ever-growing network currently comprising 91 branches across 31 Wilayahs — including 13 Business Centers dedicated to corporate clients — Société Générale Algérie offers a diversified range of innovative banking services to over 230,000 customers (households, SMEs, and corporations) and employs 1,500 staff.
Initiative Overview
In addition to IT projects (migration, software development or implementation), the bank’s Information System & Project Department also runs banking operations projects (process automation, new products & services development).
Accordingly, project success is primarily defined as the timely provision of quality deliverables to meet the expectations of internal customers and stakeholders (project sponsors, business solution users, etc.).
The PPM (Project Portfolio Manager) in charge of managing the portfolio of projects needs to ensure that project planning, capacity assessment, resource allocation and tracking are consistently as accurate and as thorough as possible.
The objectives behind the adoption of Sciforma included:
- Improving visibility on project management and on the portfolio,
- Introducing a common project management framework to standardize practices,
- Formalizing sound processes for activity and capacity planning.
“Having a structured approach and a sound planning process for tasks, deadlines, budgets, and work assignments is the only way to gain an accurate and objective understanding of our ability to take on and deliver projects of outstanding quality.”
Karim Bouktache
Project Portfolio Manager, Société Générale Algérie
- Industry: Banking
- Founded: 2000
- Headquarters: Algiers
- Clients: 450,000+
- Employees: 1,500
- Website: www.societegenerale.dz
Business Drivers and Requirements
Enhancing Visibility to Get a Better Handle on Project Management
The Information System & Project Department has two key objectives:
- On the one hand, to provide internal customers with quality deliverables to meet their expectations and achieve stakeholder satisfaction.
- On the other hand, to ensure that the planning and tracking processes optimize resource utilization and portfolio management against KPIs — such as budget adherence, forecast reliability, or the consistency and accuracy of project updates (progress and work tracking, reporting, and so forth).
Long story short, Société Générale Algérie aimed to optimize the management of its projects and of its portfolio. These requirements called for the implementation of a powerful PPM tool.
Analyzing and Standardizing Processes
The creation of a Project Portfolio Manager role and the implementation of a PPM tool had yet another objective: to standardize processes and ways of working to close performance gaps in project management.
The PPM has a responsibility to consolidate practices into a single framework in order to review the process and to identify key areas for action and project managers in need of special support.
Improving Capacity Forecasting and Planning
Among Société Générale Algérie’s key concerns was the reliability of resource planning. Resource requirement forecasts used to vary significantly from one project manager to the next, depending on the method used, and were at times quite disconnected from the actual data.
What more, manual analysis of resource activity across a portfolio of over 200 projects was a challenge. Assessing the actual resource capacity was a struggle. As a result, resources were frequently overstretched. The PPM needed capabilities to see and forecast resource requirements as accurately as possible in order to better align demand and capacity.
Sciforma Solution
Software Critical Capabilities
- Demand management
- Resource management
- Capacity management
- Portfolio management
- Project planning/scheduling
- PPM reporting/dashboards
- Collaboration/Work Management
- Program Management
- Agile
- Critical Chain
Technical Choices
- Implementation / Performance
- Managing a portfolio of over 200 projects with over 50 project managers required a powerful tool.
Services
- Admin and user training
- Implementation and integration services
Expected/Realized Benefits for Société Générale Algérie
A Comprehensive View of Project Management
The deployment of Sciforma immediately provided an inside view of project-related work. The tool consolidates all project data and operations into clear and easy-to-read visualizations. It provides objective overviews of planning and tracking activities, highlighting the discrepancies between forecasts and actuals and showing the respective performance of the different processes used by project teams. Portfolio management teams get a reliable and up-to-date picture of the portfolio, and they can assess the quality of PPM practices in order to improve where needed.
Best Practices that Boost Efficiency
Leveling up on Sciforma usage is now a performance target for project managers, who are incentivized to improve the quality of planning continuously. The dissemination of best practices is already yielding results. Société Générale Algérie has recorded improvement in resource utilization. Additionally, task automation has reduced the time spent on data processing, freeing up the PPM to focus on oversight and management.
Improved Budget Management
Sciforma has also brought about a revolution of sorts: budget-driven project management. Sciforma displays the budget impact of any operation at every phase of a project. In addition to tighter PPM cost control, this has empowered project managers to understand the value of their work on projects and to truly own their role as key players in project management.
Next Steps
Ongoing Change Management Effort
The PPM’s current focus is on driving further improvement in the usage of Sciforma while fine-tuning management processes. In addition to ongoing support, targeted coaching and training programs may be rolled out to help users improve management practices and optimize the quality of data.
Migration to Version 7 (2020-06)
As part of its pursuit of continuous improvement, Société Générale Algérie will migrate to Sciforma 7 (2020-06) in order to benefit from the tool’s latest upgrades and newest features.
“In addition to ongoing support, targeted coaching and training programs may be rolled out to help users improve management practices and optimize the quality of data.”
Karim Bouktache
Project Portfolio Manager, Société Générale Algérie
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