T-Systems elevates project management excellence

T-Systems wanted to upgrade an ageing project management platform—enabling integration with workflows across the business, alongside mobile functionality.

Powering clients' digital transformation
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.

Future-proofing project management
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. The business has a dedicated project management committee and 1,700 full time project managers. However, its 10-year-old project management platform was due for an upgrade.

T-Systems wanted its replacement to be optimised 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. Named 'PROJECTnow', the PPM platform simplifies the task of integrating with systems elsewhere in the business. Despite T-Systems’ project management and ServiceNow expertise, the implementation was conducted alongside ServiceNow professional services. It went live in June 2020.

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. All long-term projects on the old platform were migrated to PROJECTnow within six months. 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.

A new, agile approach
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. The platform will connect project management to other parts of the business, enabling project managers to better control all aspects of their projects to improve results. It enables the agile approach demanded by the business.

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