Overview in multi-project management

Intelligent Solution Services AG (hereafter referred to as iS2) was founded in 1990 as an IT and hardware specialist with an initial staff of five. With its core product, the TI-74S financial calculator, iS2 soon became the market leader and equipped a large proportion of the sales organisations of German financial service providers with ‘electronic tariff books’ and the associated software.

Since then, iS2 has grown and developed. With over 80 employees, we are a partner to the financial services industry, providing innovative products and services to support sales. Our core competence lies in the sales-oriented mapping of technically complex content in modern and future-oriented software technology.

Our customers appreciate not only our technical expertise but also our cross-interface know-how in the areas of specialist departments, IT and sales.

We offer standard systems that are adapted to the specific needs of our customers through well-rehearsed and lean customising procedures. We also implement individual requirements as part of projects.

Our latest core product is ‘inSign’, which enables legally binding electronic signatures on standard mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, etc.).

Reasons for looking for a PM tool
 

Before we launched BCS in early 2015, we used a wide range of software tools to manage the large number of projects we were working on. In addition to the classic project management tasks (planning, structuring, documenting, monitoring, weighing up risks, etc.), other HR administrative tasks that are directly related to our project management are also very important to us. These include:

• Time tracking for our employees
• Expense and travel accounting (including allocation to projects)
• Mileage tracking for our company cars
• Approval process for business trip requests

In order to link all these tasks, many manual steps were required, some of which were labour-intensive and prone to error and did not provide the necessary transparency.

So at the beginning of 2014, we started looking for a PM tool that would enable us to reduce the number of software tools we use and make our work processes leaner and more effective.

Reasons for choosing BCS

When we found out about Projektron BCS, we were faced with the exciting question of whether all our requirements could be effectively mapped by BCS and how much time would be needed for implementation. After answering ‘yes’ to our question during a two-month test phase and being convinced by the strengths and functional diversity of BCS, we began a six-month preparation and pilot phase in which we mainly carried out all the necessary configurations and adjustments and started to optimise our work processes.

BCS features in use

These two additional functions help us to effectively and efficiently optimise our work processes and make them leaner. It also saves paper, as everything can be managed electronically.

BCS in use

After we switched off some software tools at the end of 2014 and replaced them with BCS (in a ‘big bang’ move), the first introductory phase (first half of 2015) was about ensuring smooth company operations. The biggest challenge was to switch off the old central time tracking system for all employees, including all evaluations and statistics for our finance and controlling department that were based on it. By adjusting and creating all the necessary statistics and evaluations, this first introductory phase was a success.

The second introductory phase was mainly about optimising the project tree more and more and making it more detailed. This second introductory phase lasted until the end of 2015. Optimising the project tree is an ongoing process for us that will probably never be completed. We now manage over 200 current projects in the BCS project tree, structured across five project levels and organised into groups, projects and sub-projects, as well as operational activities.

Due to an internal reorganisation, the BCS project tree was completely rebuilt again in spring 2016. During this reconstruction, we benefited greatly from the inheritance functionality and flexibility of BCS. These activities were also successfully completed.

During all introductory phases, the Projektron support provided us with very reliable and important support.

Outlook

We have now been using BCS for exactly one and a half years and our experiences have been very positive throughout.

BCS is used intensively and currently all our project managers are instructed to plan and structure the individual projects even more precisely and in more detail in BCS so that our multi-project resource planning and utilisation can be improved by BCS. However, these efforts have less to do with BCS than with optimising our internal operations.

In addition to BCS, we use Jira, another very important software tool, to manage all new requirements, bugs and changes in our software projects. We are considering a pilot phase for synchronisation between BCS and Jira in the second half of the year. We are also planning to use the BCS invoicing module (invoicing) for automated invoicing of our projects managed in BCS.

Conclusion

Thanks to BCS, we have been able to replace our various software tools with BCS and to streamline and optimise our work processes, as well as to digitise some administrative tasks. Thanks to the good evaluation options in BCS, we are able to identify risks and imbalances at an early stage and take appropriate action, while also maintaining transparency of the current status of individual projects. Thus, BCS has become one of the most important tools in our daily project business.