T-Systems elevates project management excellence

Powering clients’ digital transformation
T-Systems takes project management seriously. Clients engage T-Systems for its Connectivity, Digital, Cloud & Infrastructure as well as Security services, and they expect new projects to be up and running quickly and smoothly.

T-Systems is one of the world’s leading IT service providers and suppliers of digital services. It supports more than 1,000 clients, from all regions and sectors, including the automotive industry, retail trade, logistics and transport sector, and healthcare, including all DAX 30 companies in Germany and 100 of the Fortune 500 companies globally. T-Systems operates in more than 20 countries and has around 29,000 employees. It is a subsidiary of Deutsche Telekom.

“Project management is critical to our success,” says Christian Dietrich, VP Global Project Services, T-Systems. “Our revenues come from providing IT services, but if a project doesn’t onboard effectively there is no IT service. Excellence in project management is our foundation.”

T-Systems has a holistic and central approach to project governance with a Global Project Standardization and Management body to ensure continuous improvement of project management, as well as high quality and successful execution. Project quality and risk management are an important driver of project success and customer outcome.

The 10-year-old project management platform of T-Systems was host to 1,600 internal and external projects and 3,000 users. Developed largely inhouse, based on a well-known standard project management IT platform, the last upgrade was five years ago. While the platform remained functional, it lacked certain new features.

“The old platform was difficult to customize and hard to integrate,” explains Jürgen Herczeg, responsible for Process, IT & Quality Standards at T-Systems Digital Solutions. “Integration is now critical for success. In particular, we need to integrate our project management with our IT service worlds.”

Agile is a major theme. One quarter of projects currently apply agile methodology – continuously increasing. T-Systems wanted its replacement to be optimized for mobile, capable of supporting agile methodologies, and better connected to adjacent IT domains, such as Software Development, IT Service Management, or Operations. 

Integrating project management
T-Systems already uses ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management and IT Service Management. The new project management platform is built on Project Portfolio Management (PPM) within Strategic Portfolio Management.

“ServiceNow brings state-of-the-art functionality to project management. The platform approach will make it easier to leverage meaningful data,” explains Christian.

‘PROJECTnow’, the PPM platform simplifies the task of integrating with workflows elsewhere in the business. “We can connect the various strings. The advantage of ServiceNow is that it was already in place in the business, connecting our IT systems,” says Christian.

Despite T-Systems project management and ServiceNow expertise, the implementation was conducted alongside ServiceNow professional services. It went live in June 2020.

“We have a lot of project management skills inhouse, but we had no hesitation in involving ServiceNow professional services from the start,” Christian continues. “We didn’t want to approach this project with a legacy mindset, replicating the same ideas we had in the past. ServiceNow developed the tool. They’re best placed to help us understand the platform. The know-how had been internalized and since the pilot phase we are now self-independent for 100% of our development.” 

A single view of project activity
Within six months of launch, the platform was host to 400 projects, with 900 users. Today, all new projects run on PROJECTnow, and all long-term projects on the old platform were migrated to PROJECTnow within six months.

“Early feedback from users has exceeded expectations,” says Jürgen. “Our project management community has been involved from early on. The next challenge is to decide how best to make consistent use of the different features and functionality within the Now Platform. Flexibility is great, but flexibility can sometimes be the enemy of standardization.”

The engagement creates, for the first time, a single view of all project activities within the whole company. It provides real-time updates on relevant project KPIs for time, budget, and quality and flags risks on the portfolio level that can be traced to a single project.

“We now have the power to manage our enterprise project portfolio from a central perspective,” says Christian. “We can see which projects are in critical status; create daily or weekly status reports; conduct consistent quality checks. We have the entire portfolio in front of us.”

The engagement promises to take T-Systems’ project management to a new level. The business will be better able to leverage data, plot trends, and identify best practices. There is a roadmap towards a mobile version and full customer integration.

“We see this in line with our T-Systems investment in ServiceNow,” says Christian. “The platform provides a bundled advantage and we’re confident in a great roadmap for the project management suite.” 

A new, agile approach
The platform sets in place the agile approach demanded by the business. It promises to connect project management to other parts of the business – for example, integration with Jira for software development and SAP for project financials is planned. This will enable project managers to better control all aspects of their projects to improve results.

“PROJECTnow is not just for project management, the integration with other processes in our company has a huge potential for efficiency gains,” says Christian. “The integration into the IT Service and Operations Management ecosystems was a dominant factor in choosing ServiceNow. The ability to combine different elements of the business is a huge advantage to us.” 

“Developing PROJECTnow is a journey,” Jürgen adds: “The goal is an end-to-end integration of all aspects of a project. One workflow, one interface, all compliant - thus improving the effectiveness and productivity of a project manager.” 

Constantly improving its project management suite and especially integrating classic and agile project management contributes to the strategic organizational development within T-Systems.

“Our customer projects lay the foundation for a smooth IT operation for our clients. So, moving fast is not enough, we need to secure the highest quality level in project execution,” Christian explains. “Ultimately, we want to give project managers a better tool to manage effectively and to raise the quality aspect of project management.”

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