You can watch the replay of Daniel Echtle’s full presentation, “PPM Roadmap @ Lonza & Why reporting should come first,” below:

Daniel Echtle of Lonza presented at the Tempus Resource 2020 European Virtual Conference on October 8, 2020.

The story of how Lonza, a global manufacturing partner for healthcare solutions, transformed their PPM reporting, started with some severe pain points. In his presentation at the Tempus Resource 2020 European Virtual Conference, Daniel Echtle recalled taking over as Lonza’s head of IT Portfolio Management in 2019. He noted a lack of transparency about resource availability, project status, and processes, along with poor data quality, too many projects undertaken, and no clear project evaluation or rating criteria, among other challenges. Without clear PPM reporting processes and people willing to follow them, getting projects done always required escalation, but not with collaboration or partnership. To put it simply, “We were too busy to improve,” Echtle explained. “Everyone was utilized at 100%, but nothing was getting delivered.” Moreover, executives couldn’t use data as a robust source for decision making. As such, a change needed to be made to Lonza’s process regarding project portfolio management (PPM).

Now the Global Head of IT Application Services, Echtle shares his experience of significantly increasing Lonza’s data quality and reestablishing trust in planning data by combining Tempus Resource with newly developed capabilities for creating a PPM report.

“Don’t aim for 100% utilization. This will kill your flow. At the end of the day, you’ll have busy people and unfinished projects.”

-Daniel Echtle, Lonza

PPM reporting roadmap and why reporting should come first

Lonza’s portfolio management reporting solution began with a 4-tiered roadmap that focused on Governance; Communication and Business Partnering; Automation & Reporting; and IT Capacity Management. One particular emphasis was to address the individual bottlenecks and thereby provide a way to improve the flow of the entire system. To clarify, Echtle offers a vivid metaphor of traffic. If a particular highway is at 95% capacity, the flow of traffic will be very slow. It follows that if you reduce capacity to 75%, flow will quickly accelerate. “The more we’re utilized, the longer the work takes us,” Echtle concludes. His goal was to create a way to “eliminate busy-ness,” get rid of the jams, and re-establish a flow in order to finish projects on time.

“The Tempus dashboard was really a game changer,” Echtle recalls. It became Lonza’s “system landscape,” serving as a single source of truth for users that could be accessed across all departments and integrated with several other platforms and apps that all flow through Tempus.

Today, project prioritization at Lonza stems from a rating system that scores IT Complexity alongside Business Value. First priority is given to PPM reports with low complexity and high value, while those with low value and high complexity become candidates for cancellation. This concept of canceling projects was new to Lonza, but it was key to actually getting more projects done. Other lessons learned include using project portfolio reporting to enable prioritizing and delivering reports and projects by doing less and keeping it simple, identifying and clearing bottlenecks regarding resources, optimizing data quality, leveraging automation, and gaining management buy-in.

To learn more about how Resource Portfolio Management can help your organization access and leverage leverage quality data and accurate, up-to-date reporting, contact ProSymmetry, makers of Tempus Resource. And be sure to check out all of our speakers from the Tempus Resource 2020 European Virtual Conference.