How Fluid gave Investec a single view of their entire project world

“I’ve done timesheet deployments in other firms, so I know what I’m doing, and with Fluid it was simple because it’s [Resourcing, Financials and Allocations] all in one application”

PMO Lead

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Meet Investec

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Investec is an international bank and wealth manager with an ‘Out of the Ordinary’ purpose to create enduring worth, living in society, not off it. Investec exists to create enduring worth for all its stakeholders; clients, colleagues, and the communities in which they operate, a defining approach that has been in existence since the organisation was founded in Johannesburg, South Africa, in 1974. 

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As a dual-listed company on both the Johannesburg and London stock exchanges since 2002, Investec helps people to build businesses, grow families and create legacies. Its hands-on approach means it builds deep client relationships based on trust to help make the extraordinary possible. With a team of more than 8,000 people across five continents, Investec is a truly global bank. 

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Driven by a strategic intent to be seen as ‘One Investec’ by both clients and colleagues, there was a growing need to align multiple business areas and activities across geographically dispersed teams.

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The Challenges

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Following a successful implementation of Fluid for the Business Change team in the Private Bank, the Business Change team for Investec Wealth and Investment (IWI) in the UK and the Change Delivery team for Investec Technology Services (ITS) globally became interested in how Fluid could help in resolving multiple challenges in prioritising work, tracking effort and duration, and ensuring that the best value was delivered to Investec for the investments being made.   

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Whilst they are separate change delivery teams in different parts of Investec Bank, both the IWI UK and ITS teams faced very similar challenges:

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• Tracking status, progress and resources across multiple projects was a time-consuming and manual process.
• With geographically dispersed teams, it was difficult to view all work globally. 
• Creating portfolio reports from individual project reports was time-consuming. It was identified that portfolio reports could be more effective in conveying key information to senior and executive management.  
• It was identified that better portfolio data would improve the ability to analyse delivery performance, people utilisation and funding consumption.

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The Solution

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Given these challenges, Fluid’s all-in-one Project Portfolio Management (PPM) software provided great benefits to both delivery teams. A single consistent platform for project data enabled reliable and accurate portfolio reporting. 

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Instant online access to reliable, real-time information meant that Investec’s people allocations and financial costs were not only easily visible, but also accurate for up-to-date analysis and reporting. 

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With all the delivery metrics available in one solution, team managers, platform managers, product managers and service managers could collaborate and make strategic data-based prioritisation decisions to aid agile working. 

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Unifying the different Investec teams’ way of working to collaborate easily and efficiently was fundamental. The simplicity of Fluid and ease-of-use meant each team could adopt an intuitive tool to work with. 

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“I no longer have to manually marry all project resources to costs. I can make evidence-based decisions immediately.”

- Central IT Manager, Investment Bank

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Making the switch

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A small team of four people was able to collate data from hundreds of resources and projects. This data was then pushed to form a single data set in Fluid and went live with the help of our team in just 8 weeks. 

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Administrators and champions were trained in parallel for efficiency, ensuring the roll out of Fluid to the portfolio was both expected and understood, giving it a greater opportunity for successful user adoption. 

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More in-depth training was provided on specific topics of interest to the teams, such as the Financial Management module. This ensured the approach to using the functionality was consistent across all teams, whilst enabling them to work in their preferred way.

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Although Fluid is deployed as a single instance for Investec and has been used across teams in different internal business units previously, the configurable hierarchy and taxonomy of the solution allowed Investec to set up team dashboards to meet their specific challenges, whilst maintaining a consistent organisational approach.

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Getting teams on board

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Change can be hard and rolling out a new PPM solution to an organisation in the right way is critical to its success. 

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We gave training and education sessions focused on the benefits to each role which allowed teams to understand the reason for Investec adopting Fluid, how they would use it in their daily work, and how their governance applied to features within the software. 

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We worked closely with all team members in the weeks following the go-live; tweaking, refining data and configuration, and providing support to the Investec administrators for a successful roll out. We also provided online support so Investec teams could see the full value that Fluid added. 

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“Working with Fluid is great, they are so responsive to requests and small enhancements, it makes the whole thing much easier”

Program Manager

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The Results

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Investec’s challenges when it approached us were from a visibility and data perspective, however since implementing Fluid, it has been used to support the business in other areas too. As well as change delivery teams, operational and support teams have also begun using Fluid to track activities. 

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Investec has benefited from a strong return on investment (with the decommissioning of legacy PPM software and hardware) and, by moving to the Cloud with a fully managed solution, it is able to take advantage of the continuous improvements to Fluid from regular feature releases.

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PMOs can keep clear track of their resources, their projects and cross department portfolios in one solution. Thanks to Fluid’s transparency and in-depth reporting functionalities, executives are now able to drill into their strategic alignment, division, department and teams to get the information required for exception reporting and evidence-based decision making.  

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