How Fluid empowered Massmart's project management teams

‍Meet Massmart

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Acquired by American retail giant Walmart in 2011, the Massmart Group is a South African company operating in over 400 stores in 12 countries in sub-Saharan Africa.

Massmart has ownership of several leading local retail brands such as Game, DionWired, Makro, Builder's Warehouse and CB and total trading profits upward of £38million.

As the second-largest distributor of consumer goods in Africa, Massmart is the largest retailer of general merchandise, liquor and home improvement equipment and a wholesaler of basic foods.

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The Challenges

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Massmart’s challenge was that their project management teams’ lacked alignment with the company’s requirements to achieve their goals. With no formal system in place to aid project tracking and overall management, Massmart Change Teams relied on the messy process of shared documents, spreadsheets and emails. Each business has its own PMO structure with varying levels of maturity and different ways or working, this consequently made it difficult to get a single version of the truth

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The crucial hurdles that needed addressing were:

1. Empower project managers by providing a more efficient way to manage their portfolios effectively, making activities such as financial and benefit tracking, running steerco meetings and updating project health statuses, easier. This, in turn, would standardise the way the business as a whole would work.
2. To have a consolidated and real-time view of programs to check delivery statuses across the board and have visibility of a single source of truth.

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“There was no one place I could go to find information on a project. What’s going on, what it’s about, who’s part of the project, where it is tracking, the status, risks and issues. To get any sort of view required manual effort - cold calling several people for updates, and the consolidation of multiple information sources and different formats - which invariably led to inaccuracies.”

Gordon Mathee, Business Relationship Executive

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The Solution

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Providing the Massmart teams with a more efficient way of working was an easy win forFluid, its all-in-one capabilities meant Massmart didn’t need to trawl through spreadsheets, documents, emails and still need to call people, just to track and manage their projects. Fluid’s all-in-one solution also reduces manual effort and admin, further empowering project managers at Massmart by enhancing their productivity and saving them time when it comes to collating information for important meetings like Steerco, or when they need an overview of their entire project portfolio.

Access to real-time information improved the data quality and provided a single source of truth; responding directly to a key hurdle that Massmart needed to overcome. Standardised reporting across the business was made easier too with the use of Fluid dashboards and detailed reporting capabilities.

Fluid is an easy-to-use and intuitive software which helps the success of its adoption by employees In Massmart, this meant there could be a standardised way of working and delivery framework.

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“It used to take a day to build a pack, now it’s much less. Efficiencies mean I can use my time much better.”

David Meiring, Project Manager

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“The risk, issue and dependency management with visual mapping is beyond next level.”

Marius van Vuuren, Programme Manager

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Getting teams on board

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Massmart needed a solution that was easy to implement an easy and fit-for-purpose; they needed something that people would want to use. With so many stakeholders across different business areas, there needed to be a minimal learning curve to encourage adoption.

Massmart also needed the solution to be customised; the various PMOs needed to be able to adapt it to their varying requirements. The modular design features of Fluid meant Massmart was able to onboard PMOs with only the features and functionality they needed to respond to their individual use cases. This ensured that stakeholders and users were not overwhelmed with a stack of features they did not need. The Fluid team were on-hand to answer any queries or make adjustments to ensure the features were just right for each individual.

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“Fluid was a good fit for us – it is intuitive and has an agility to it.It’s simple to use and easy to collaborate. It’s also not a solution that follows the typical SDLC approach for deployment. The intuitiveness of the solution means you just turn it on, use it, play with it and start realising the visibility and benefits almost immediately.”

Gordon Mathee, Business Relationship Executive

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“You’ve got impacts, risks and issues in one place, you’ve got outstanding tasks in one place, you’ve got all milestones and planned activity in one place – and you can pull a single report on what’s outstanding for a project and all its linked meetings and boards.”

Ayanda Malinga, Business Analyst Manager

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“The support team has been amazing! Every time I've logged a call, they've been very responsive – they've called, they've solved the problem. It's great to know you've got good support on the other side.”

Andrea de Klerk, Project Manager

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The Results

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Massmart’s key challenges were around empowering their project managers to work more efficiently and having a single source of truth for all project data. With the help of Fluid and all its advanced functionality, Massmart has been able to roll out the software across the organisation with benefits for everyone - all project meetings are now run in Fluid!

As all program and project information in one place, PMO leads, business stakeholders and product owners have immediate and transparent access to portfolio, program and project information, at the click of a button.

Real-time, dynamic dashboards give Massmart stakeholders just what they need, when and how they need it. With the use of standardised reporting layouts, all projects are reported on in the same way making it much easier for stakeholders to compare apples with apples. Fluid’s customisable templates have made different reporting views easy to generate, saving project managers hours of manual effort.

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“I get reminders of what's outstanding. If I forget to send out meeting minutes – Fluid reminds me. Little things like that mean a lot when you're a project manager.”

Phyllis Chueu, Project Manager

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“The construct, the collaborative approach and the ease of access to all information made it the best fit. From an agile perspective - how we are built to learn and the agility of the project managers - Fluid works perfectly.”

Gordon Mathee, Business Relationship Executive

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“The one pager status report I love. I think that is the best thing in Fluid for me because I can share that PDF with anyone in the organisation around where my project is - by just pressing one button.”

Kobus Mostert, Project Manager

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