The challenge

People’s Partnership is a not-for-profit financial services organisation whose main product is The People’s Pension. Around 6.5m people at over 100,000 organisations across the UK pay into this workplace pension every month. In fact, today People’s Partnership now helps one in five UK workers save for a better retirement.
Like any modern financial services organisation, People’s Partnership deals with vast amounts of data, putting technology front and centre. Across a typical year, the People’s Partnership team will have around 30 data-driven projects going on, led by different project managers.
However, as the business grew, processes got layered on top of each other and complexity got magnified. Each project was delivered and managed separately, within its own SharePoint folder structure. Every team member managed projects slightly differently: some used Microsoft Excel for project plans, for instance, while others preferred Microsoft Project.
That lack of standardisation made it impossible to create a “single source of truth” across all projects and made reporting extremely time-consuming and manual. Each project manager only had access to their particular SharePoint, so there was no visibility across all of them. That siloed approach slowed the organisation down and hindered the ability to gain and act on insights and learnings.
Things got even more complicated when it came to timesheets and budgeting. Project managers were forecasting project costs using Excel spreadsheets they updated manually at the end of each month, with information taken from two other systems. It was a lengthy and convoluted process. And it meant that project managers had no visibility on budget tracking until halfway through the following month.
Lastly, project reporting was done via PowerPoint. Again, this was a manual process that took significant amounts of time. When each report was finally completed, the project would have moved on and it would be too late to act on the information.
People’s Partnership knew it needed a more modern and mature approach to every aspect of project management. One that helped it access trustworthy data, drive better decision-making, allocate resources effectively and report to stakeholders.
People’s Partnership was already using ServiceNow within its IT function and asked UP3, as part of its ServiceNow Managed Service, to examine how ServiceNow could transform its portfolio management while also considering how best to quickly implement the software and start delivering results.