Driving simplicity and productivity
The McMillan Shakespeare Group (MMSG) is an Australian leading provider of salary packaging, novated leasing, asset management, and related financial products and services. Through its subsidiaries, it offers a breadth of services and expertise, designed to responsibly deliver superior long-term value to its customers.
Over the past two years, a strategic Project Management Office (PMO) was set up to drive the key priorities for MMSG’s ‘Simply Stronger’ strategy. One of its initiatives is to drive simplicity and increase productivity via technology enablement.
ServiceNow Strategic Portfolio Management (SPM) was deployed to help the organization respond faster to change by improving the alignment of project investments with strategic priorities.
“ServiceNow SPM helps to break down silos and provides visibility on financial and resource constraints across the enterprise,” explains Sean Nairn, Strategic Planning and Delivery Manager at McMillan Shakespeare. “This empowers our managers to make informed decisions on investment choices and achieve business outcomes faster.”
Optimizing resources and capacity planning
Previously, MMSG used numerous spreadsheets to track critical project activities such as demand and resource costs. However, links and formulas were often broken, causing significant confusion and frustration for employees.
There were also around 240 users entering their timesheets into a legacy tool; however, a quarter of those users were outside Australia and could not access the database themselves. As a result, users had to complete a spreadsheet and email it to the administration team. This process for collecting actual timesheet data was unreliable and required manual effort to maintain an acceptable level of accuracy.
“With the previously siloed processes, we had no visibility in project performance and resource costs,” Sean says. “And with a growing number of projects, it was unsustainable and risky for the business.”
To support its vision to simplify business processes with technology, MMSG rolled out ServiceNow SPM to provide visibility of all demand and project work statuses and match resources with business requirements.
By using Time Card Management within SPM, 100% of timesheet users can enter data directly into the portal. This has eliminated the process of emailing spreadsheets, with user satisfaction improved as a result.
“Thanks to ServiceNow SPM, it takes less than a minute for users to enter timesheet details, which is 50% faster than before,” Sean says. “Managers can also easily validate and approve timesheets via a single portal.”
With 50 projects in progress at any one time, MMSG also links ServiceNow Resource Management with Time Card Management to analyze resource availability and Project managers can also receive early warnings about cost runovers so they can take corrective action sooner.
“Having a single place to view staff capacities, allocations, and availability for all project activities, it’s now easier to identify potential bottlenecks, improve capex and opex forecasting, and gain control in project costs,” Sean explains. “For example, when people start a new project, managers can simply generate allocation reports from ServiceNow and decide if they need to bring in more resources.”
Improving forecasting and making better strategic decisions
Before ServiceNow, project demands were managed on disparate spreadsheets. There was no link to the timesheet system or resource planning, making it difficult to track and forecast demand for projects in different areas such as IT, digital services, and web development.
By using ServiceNow Demand Management with Resource Management, MMSG can automatically collect, score, and prioritize requests based on the value of the new projects to the business. This also helps line managers to track KPIs relating to the resource utilization rate more effectively.
For example, PMO provides forecasts for resource availability during the 90-day planning sessions. With the Resource Allocation Workbench, line managers can easily identify any shortages in developers or engineers, or allocate existing developers to support certain projects. This enables MMSG to improve forecasting accuracy and reduce unforeseen project expenditure.
“In the past, we didn’t have a single pane of glass to track demands and resource capacities,” Sean explains. “With ServiceNow SPM, we have a holistic view of demands and resource availability. This empowers us to make informed investment decisions on projects.”
Sean adds that the capability to manage and forecast demands also enables the PMO to better align project investments with the overall business strategy.
“We can now be more proactive instead of reactive in resource planning,” Sean says. “That helps us drive simplicity and productivity across the business.”
Building the foundation to support continuous improvement
MMSG rolled out ServiceNow IT Service Management (ITSM) in 2019 and plans to build the Configuration Management Database (CMDB), streamline request processes, and create more training documents for task fulfillers.
Brenda Doonan, Service Delivery Manager at McMillan Shakespeare, says: “While some issues were encountered due to the quality of data input, our goal is to drive continuous improvement of ITSM and make it work better together with SPM.”
ServiceNow partner Sysintegra assisted MMSG with the rollout of SPM and provided ongoing support for ITSM.
“Sysintegra has extensive experience in ServiceNow and advised us on the best and most appropriate modules to start with. Its support has been great,” Sean says.
Having the ability to improve resource utilization and track demands, Sean plans to leverage ServiceNow SPM to support ideation processes for MMSG’s 2025 business budget cycle, and will work with individual business areas to further improve portfolio planning and build new business cases for management approvals.
“ServiceNow gives us a single, AI-driven cloud platform to make better decisions and align future investments with our strategy,” Sean concludes.