Boursorama: Enhancing Project Management Agility and Reliability

Boursorama Company Overview

A subsidiary of Société Générale, Boursorama is a pioneer and leader in its three key areas of business: online banking, online brokerage, and online financial information. For 20 years, Boursorama has unwaveringly committed to making life easier for customers while offering the best value-for-money and quality of service.

Meeting new customer expectations is a key driver of growth for Boursorama. Thanks to efforts to further simplify user experience and improve service efficiency while ensuring security and reducing costs, Boursorama is strengthening its leading position in the French banking market year after year and is aiming to serve more than 4.5 million customers by 2025.

Industry: Bank
Founded: 1998
Headquarters: Boulogne-Billancourt
Website: groupe.boursorama.fr



“The IT department’s activity has increased more than threefold since we adopted Sciforma in 2012. The tool has really helped us manage this rapid growth without complicating our internal process. It provides hassle-free support to the PMO and users in their daily activities. The staff also appreciated the changeover to the streamlined and user-friendly interfaces of version 7.”

Philippe Hayes
IT Manager


Initiative Overview

Fast-paced business growth led Boursorama’s IT department to acquire a professional tool in order to better formalize the management of projects and programs. Chosen for the wealth of functionality and scalability it offers, Sciforma has facilitated project management, monitoring, and reporting while increasing reliability. The PMO made the decision to focus usage on the staple functionality of the tool in order to keep it simple. This has enabled the firm to strike the right balance between supervision and agility, while contributing to successful adoption of the solution.

Business Drivers and Requirements

A Tool With Visible Added Value

In the late 2000s, back when the young company was a mere third of its current size, Boursorama had to implement a project management tool to comply with the policy of its parent company Société Générale. Full-web tool Daptiv was selected for its lightness, but failed to gain user adoption and support. In 2011, the arrival of a new CIO and the company’s solid growth prospects prompted the PMO to issue a RFP to find a tool better suited to Boursorama.

The Importance of Scalability

The CIO wanted not only a management tool providing a full range of powerful features to improve data intelligence and help project managers better track their projects and budgets, but also a flexible solution that could easily scale up to accommodate business growth. For the fast-rising company, it was key to choose a solution offering a growth path.

Fitting the Boursorama Culture of Agility of a Natively-Digital Business

While rapid business growth made it key to industrialize project management processes to effectively support rising demand for IT services, Boursorama did not want to stifle the agility and responsiveness that underpin its philosophy and DNA. Unlike players in the manufacturing sector, where the need for airtight supply chains demands painstakingly meticulous processes, Boursorama is a pure player that derives its strength from its ability to pivot swiftly. The IT department was looking for a flexible and easy-to-use tool with minimal process complexity.

Sciforma Solution

Software Critical Capabilities

Services

Sciforma went live at the beginning of 2012 and has since been used across the IT department of Boursorama, which recently migrated to version 7 of the software. Consultants from ACDE-Conseil have been working with Boursorama since the implementation of Sciforma to support the internal PMO team. With their expertise in software tools, project management, and change management, ACDE-Conseil were able to configure Sciforma to meet specific user expectations, and they also built a custom reporting system. Finally, they facilitated user adoption of the tool by delivering targeted training sessions, by creating educational documents, and by providing operational support to all users.

Technical Choices

On-site hosting



“We were looking for a solution providing a framework to help structure and focus project activities, but we didn’t want to overwhelm technical users with administrative requirements, as project management is not their primary focus”

Philippe Hayes
IT Manager


Expected/Realized Benefits & Next Steps

Fine-Tuning Management of Project Activity

With Sciforma, Boursorama finally enjoys the robustness of a proper management tool that makes it possible to both centralize and formalize project activities at the IT department level. Sciforma provides a single version of the truth for all resource and project data. The ability to characterize projects, using a variety of attributes to make them easier to understand and to manage, and the ability to zoom in on tasks and assignments within the Gantt chart have combined to improve control over project life cycle, including budget management. In particular, project team time tracking allows project managers to allocate and manage resources in a detailed and granular way. The result? Significant increase in on-budget delivery rate. All this achieved with an easy-to-use, low-maintenance tool.

Easier Reporting

The bulk of Boursorama’s project portfolio is made up of 12 large programs focused on strategic areas, such as customer relationship management, regulatory compliance, and payment methods. Within these programs, a number of cross-functional projects that require heightened coordination and supervision are reviewed by a hierarchy of committees ranging from operational to strategic. In addition, the PMO reports on the activity of the IT department to the executive committee on a monthly basis. In order to provide these various decision-making bodies with fresh, reliable, and easy-to-digest information, Sciforma’s data is extracted into a comprehensive and accurate datamart before being manipulated and formatted for reporting. Such easy access to high-quality datasets has driven a drastic reduction in the time spent producing reports and has also improved the quality of reporting.

Supporting Boursorama’s PMO

The IT department’s PMO division performs a number of diverse functions. In addition to providing logistical support and day-to-day guidance to project managers, the PMO acts as a hub for program management and ensures operational consistency across programs. It is therefore responsible for making sure that projects run smoothly and that deliverables meet the quality standards. With its strategic vision of the company’s roadmap, the PMO is also empowered to act as the custodian of the data: it is responsible for collecting, consolidating, and circulating all the appropriate information across the hierarchy after ensuring its relevance.

Sciforma facilitates the work of the PMO by providing a battery of reports and checkpoints to monitor project progress, as well as automatic mechanisms to verify the quality of data inputs.

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