Multiple Initiatives

Aprelion helps client simultaneously manage multiple, strategic cost savings and efficiency initiatives.

Company

Privately held, energy and fuel retailer – acquisition, storage, and distribution – serving thousands of customers across 12 US states and Canada, also operates 30+ convenience stores.

Challenge

The Client had established multiple strategic initiatives to be completed within the current calendar year. The initiatives were spread across business units and executives. The leadership team had limited time to plan or organize project efforts, and there was no formal PMO or available project managers. Strategic project initiatives were stalled or progressing slowly, and had little chance of completing successfully.

SOLUTION

With the increased number of organizational projects and the lack of available internal Project Management resources, the Client called on Aprelion’s project management expertise.

Aprelion stepped-up to the challenge and first met with the project stakeholders to conduct a Project Discovery. The Project Discovery was necessary to ensure that all requirements were captured and that they matched the perceived project expectations for success. Once it was discovered that several of the projects would be conducted in parallel, Aprelion analyzed the impact on the areas of the organization the project would be affecting.

Aprelion worked with the client team to pinpoint focused teams that could effectively cross-function between the initiatives. It was also identified that communication would be a critical success factor between the projects. With this in mind, Aprelion implemented the use of a cloud-based Project Portfolio Management (PPM) tool. By doing so, multiple projects could be simultaneously tracked; and communication, files, and calendars could be centrally located. In addition, all project stakeholders were able to stay current on the project team’s interactions, status and progress on the PPM dashboard. The PPM tool was also critical to coordinating efforts of five different external software and hardware vendors.

With the multitude of project sub-teams, careful project planning, scheduling, and precise communication was necessary; as any issue would impact installation and implementation, and thus affect other project tasks and vendor schedules. A blend of traditional PMBOK Project Methodologies and Agile was developed and executed. Daily progress meeting were held to ensure that all necessary team members were aware of each other’s needs and challenges and how they may affect another’s work that day. Weekly status meeting with the client management team summarized the team progress and highlighted areas in which management assistance was needed.

Results

With an Aprelion’s experienced Project Manager, the client’s projects were successfully delivered in parallel, on-time, with-in budget, and exceeded the stakeholder and executive management expectations. Aprelion’s innovative project management approach enabled the project teams to achieve the installation and configuration of an enterprise software system for their operations division; as well as install and configure a critical hardware upgrade that increased security throughout all their stores.

As one Executive stated, “As an organization, we rarely if ever all agree on something, but in the case of Aprelion, we ALL agree that they are the experts in the right way to successfully manage our strategic projects!”