This leading oil and gas company focuses on upstream, downstream, and trading activities with operations around the world. Its Global Business Services department executed a massive organizational transformation, which merged two halves of the company into one: Upstream and downstream become a single entity to embody the new organization of this oil and gas company, which now considers its focus on renewable energy as important as its traditional business.
Common Office Tools
This leading oil and gas company focuses on upstream, downstream, and trading activities with operations around the world. Leading up to the organizational transformation that would combine upstream and downstream activities into a single organizational unit, the Global Business Services department was chartered to coordinate the transition of thousands of roles globally. Existing teams were reorganized into new teams at all levels of the organization and roles were transitioned to other locations as needed.
The transition included offshoring, with some roles also coming back onshore. They started with tools such as Excel and SharePoint to coordinate efforts, but to effectively manage the transition, strategic portfolio management tools were needed to:
- Provide a way to manage both transformation and transition projects through controlled project workflow stages.
- Enable Project Managers to submit weekly status updates without having to re-enter the same updates in related projects and without having to re-enter the same updates if there was no change from the previous period.
- Allow teams to schedule detailed tasks as needed, but with the ability to roll up key milestones into roadmaps, including the breakdown of projects into subproject while retaining the relationships for reporting.
- Centralize the entry of required roles and candidates through the life of a transition project while having the ability to automatically integrate status updates from the Human Resources department.
- Include a facility to manage the cost budget, forecast, and actuals, along with corresponding benefits expressed in headcount.
Weekly Status Updates
Shortly after the initial setup of the solution – a combination of Project Online, UMT360, and Power BI – the team needed an efficient way to manage weekly status updates of multiple projects. On the data entry side, there was a need to enter updates without duplication of effort. The platform was adjusted to allow for top-down status updates at the project level without having to provide updates in each related subproject. In addition, the current update starts with a copy of the previous update allowing Project Managers to only focus on what changed while having the ability to review past updates on the same page. On the reporting side, there was a need to automatically create status reports of multiple projects at once with the click of a button. A new report was created using the same shared data source, which allows the team to quickly identify red or amber projects and export all project-on-a-page reports to PowerPoint in one go.
Recruitment and Human Resources
In addition to powerful work management capabilities, the solution offers functionality for managing recruitment information that comes with the transformation. Each transition project represents multiple roles that need to be staffed during the life of the project. During early workflow stages, the number and types of roles are entered in the context of the project. Having passed required exit criteria for each stage, staffing and candidate updates from the Human Resources department are automatically integrated, to ensure a successful end-to-end transition of the transformation.
OUR TEAM NOW HAS AN AUTOMATED SINGLE SOURCE OF TRUTH THAT COMBINES POWERFUL SCHEDULING CAPABILITIES WITH EFFICIENT WAYS OF MANAGING STATUS, RECRUITMENT, AND FINANCIALS.
Senior Vice President
Global Business Services 