Overview in multi-project management

Intelligent Solution Services AG (hereinafter referred to as iS2 for short) was founded in 1990 as an EDP and hardware specialist with initially five employees. With its core product, the TI-74S financial calculator, iS2 soon became the market leader and equipped a large part of the sales organizations of German financial service providers with "electronic rate books" and the associated software.

In the meantime, iS2 has grown and developed. With over 80 employees, we are a partner to the financial services industry, delivering 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.

In addition to our technical expertise, our customers value 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-established and lean customizing processes. Within the scope of projects, we also realize individual requirements.

Our latest core product is "inSign", which enables legally compliant electronic signatures on commercially available mobile devices (smartphones, tablets, ...).

Motives for the search for a PM tool

Before we introduced BCS productively at the beginning of 2015, we used a wide variety of software tools to manage the large number of projects we were running. In addition to the classic project management tasks (planning, structuring, documenting, monitoring, weighing risks, etc.), other HR administrative tasks that are directly related to our project management are also of great importance to us. These include:

• Time recording of our employees
• Expense and travel accounting (incl. accounting for projects)
• Mileage recording of our company cars
• Approval procedure for business trip requests

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

Thus, at the beginning of 2014, we started looking for a PM tool that would allow us to reduce the multitude of software tools and make our work processes more streamlined and effective.

Reasons for BCS

When we became aware of Projektron BCS, we asked ourselves the exciting question of whether all of our requirements could be effectively mapped by BCS and what the time required for implementation would be. After our question was answered with "yes" during a two-month test phase and we were able to convince ourselves of the strengths and the functional diversity of BCS, we began a six-month preparation and pilot phase, during which we mainly made all the necessary configurations and adjustments and began to optimize our work processes.

Functions used by BCS

Except for the ticket system, Scrum and invoicing (billing), we use almost the entire range of functions of BCS. In particular these are:

• Project management (currently over 200 projects)
• Internal company structure, synchronized with LDAP
• Management of our external customer contacts
• A large number of evaluations and reports (also generated via report orders)
• Time recording (also with the BCS app) for all employees
• Synchronization of project, team and appointment calendars with Outlook (via Exchange)
• Expense recording (of travel expenses and out-of-pocket expenses)

Especially for our needs, we have also had the following functional enhancements implemented and configured together with the Projektron support team:

• A dialog for mileage recording of our company cars, including report generation.
• A workflow for the electronic approval procedure of business trip requests, including automatic transfer of the attributes to the travel expense report.

These two additional functionalities help us to optimize and streamline our work processes effectively and efficiently. 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 (as a "big bang"), the first implementation phase (first half of 2015) was about ensuring smooth company operations. The biggest challenge was the shutdown of the old central time recording system for all employees including all evaluations and statistics based on it for our finance and controlling department. By making adjustments and creating all the necessary statistics and evaluations, this first implementation phase was successful.

In the second implementation phase, the main focus was on optimizing the project tree more and more and making it more detailed. This second implementation phase lasted until the end of 2015. Optimizing the project tree is a constant process for us that will probably never be completed. In the meantime, we manage more than 200 current projects in the BCS project tree, divided over five project levels and structured via groups, projects and sub-projects as well as operational activities.

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

In all implementation phases, Projektron support formed a very reliable and important back-up for us.

Outlook

In the meantime, we have been using BCS for exactly one and a half years and the 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 in BCS even more precisely and in more detail, so that our multi-project resource planning and utilization can be improved by BCS. However, these efforts have less to do with BCS than optimizing our internal way of working.

In addition to BCS, we have another very important software tool in use, JIRA, which we use to manage all new requests, bugs and changes in our software projects. For the second half of the year, we are planning a pilot phase for synchronization between BCS and JIRA. We also plan to use the BCS invoicing module (Faktura) 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 streamline and optimize our work processes as well as digitize some administrative tasks. Thanks to good evaluation possibilities in BCS, we are able to recognize risks and imbalances at an early stage and to take action on them, as well as to obtain transparency of the current status of the individual projects. Thus, BCS has become one of the most important tools in our daily project business.