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How Portfolio Manager helped turn an Airways New Zealand project around in 24 hours

From Team '23

Tempo Team

There are few operations where managing risk and uncertainty are more important than air traffic control. With projects critical to keeping the safety of aircraft and passengers, Airways New Zealand needed a robust project management solution to enable them to ensure projects got done on time, track budgets, and to identify potential risks.

Staying on time and in budget

The team at Airways New Zealand have a challenge familiar to most teams. How do you balance ambitious plans with the reality of your resources?

Tim Hughes, director of solutions and services at Airways New Zealand, said: “We had a team working on a project, and when they put the plan and estimates into Portfolio Manager and produced the project plan, it was two times the budget and two times too late!”

Even the most gifted employees need structure to ensure projects are scoped out, milestones mapped, and deadlines digestible. Without adequate support for planning, hitting deadlines on time and within budget is a challenge.

The team were using Microsoft Projects and some corporate-scale resource management program covering the whole company, but they needed a project planning solution that would give them earned value reporting and would let them manage uncertainty to see where the risks lay.

The solution: Simplify with Portfolio Manager

After researching a number of options, Hughes settled on Portfolio Manager. After researching and studying Portfolio Manager while everyone was on vacation, Hughes decided he wanted it. When the team got back from vacation, Hughes told them about Portfolio Manager, and it took them well under an hour to decide they wanted it, too. They put the trial licenses in place and ran with it for the first three weeks.

After implementing Portfolio Manager, the team set about working with the team to simplify the project to ensure it wouldn’t go over budget and it would meet the deadline.

Hughes added: “They knew what needed to be done, so we told them to simplify and to change the tasks. We put the simplified tasks into Portfolio Manager and saw the time estimates change. We changed the job and used the tool to execute the project and keep track of how we were doing as we went along.”

A complete turnaround in just 24 hours

The deadline couldn’t be moved so the team knew they had to change the tasks and, using Portfolio Manager, they were able to surpass everyone’s expectations.

Portfolio Manager transformed the way they performed and acted and changed what they did to meet the deadlines. The team changed their plans so that it would work and ended up finishing the project a few days early.

Hughes said: “In that 24-hour period when we moved the project from being over-budget and over-schedule to on-time. The ROI was phenomenal. Portfolio Manager was so effective at being flexible. We wouldn’t have had the same visibility with other planning tools.

“This was a small scale project and the ROI was 30 percent of the project budget. Portfolio Manager paid for its entire licensing fee in one day.”

Leveraging Portfolio Manager’s predictive scheduling capabilities, Airways New Zealand were able to transform a project into a success, and improve efficiencies for projects going forward.