[Case study] A PMO's recipe for optimising the development cycles of its industrial projects

When you serve customers in industries such as aerospace, energy and defence, it's crucial to deliver on time. Aubert & Duval knows all about that. The French metallurgist develops high-performance steels to design complex, custom-made parts for companies operating in critical sectors.

The company therefore wanted to improve its control over the design and manufacturing cycles for its products. It achieved this by adopting Sciforma's project portfolio management software.

Here's an interview with Arnaud Montels, Head of Aubert & Duval's Project Management Office (PMO), to take a look back at this successful initiative and find out more about this PPM tool.

See all software Project Portfolio Management (PPM)

What initially led you to equip yourself with a project management tool?

Arnaud Montels:

In a nutshell, we wanted to improve our efficiency and customer satisfaction by optimising our product development projects.

Major challenges

Typically, our design projects last several months, and require significant initial investment. For example, we need to order several tonnes of superalloys, which can be traded at around €60 per kilo: do the math!

What's more, the parts that our customers expect from us are of a critical nature. They include landing gear and other components essential to the construction of an aircraft. Any delay will affect our customers and damage their satisfaction, which is of course our priority.

All this to say that we have no right to make mistakes. With so much at stake, it's essential to carry out our projects as efficiently as possible, and to scrupulously honour our commitments.

The problem of matching workload to capacity

Previously, we didn't have the means to ensure perfect control of our production cycles, mainly because we had difficulty seeing things clearly. Each team kept track of its projects in Excel, but we had no consolidated view of current and future workloads. Having an overall view was all the more complicated because our design teams are spread over several sites, including one in India, and they carry out projects of different types and nature.

Without knowing and anticipating the load, we couldn't adapt capacity to it. So we often ended up with overloaded teams, and sometimes we even had to turn down projects because we simply didn't have the manpower to handle them.

The primary objective of acquiring a project management tool was therefore to be able to adapt team capacity to the workload, rather than the other way round.

Another important challenge was to better identify and analyse these workloads in order to better prioritise and improve the management of development cycles.

Sciforma's software offered us solutions to these problems. So we adopted the tool and put it into operation at the beginning of 2018.

Has the tool lived up to its promise? What have you gained from deploying Sciforma?

Arnaud Montels:

The key word: visibility

First and foremost, the tool has given us a central database in which all our data is automatically consolidated, in real time. No more juggling between several Excel files, everything is in the same place. No more worries about data reliability, because automation eliminates the risk of error.

We now have an overall view of our current projects: we know clearly what phase of development each project is in.

And we also know where we're going. The software immediately gave us new visibility over our forecast workload. As soon as a project is created, the design team selects from a library a pre-prepared schedule model that includes milestones and generic workloads.

Illustration image Sciforma 7.1 - Example of a roadmap.

Then, throughout the life of the project, changes in the actual workload compared with the forecast workload are monitored, weighted and analysed along several axes (by type of project, by phase, etc.). This enables us to refine our models and forecasts over time.

Above all, all this information, for each of our projects, is reflected in real time in a single workload plan, consolidated across all our teams. As a result, we now have global visibility over an 18-month period on the future workload of the design teams: we can therefore forecast the capacity required, and anticipate any recruitment that may be necessary.

Illustration image Sciforma 7.1 - Project Planning Centre.

Moreover, the transparency offered by the tool enabled us to demonstrate to our management the overload of our teams, which have since been reinforced by a total of 26 new recruits. Sciforma gives us the resources we need to fulfil our mission and work effectively.

One for all, all for one

Greater efficiency, then, both collectively and individually. Users now enter their time spent in Sciforma, which has enabled us to identify and analyse inertia and sources of wasted time... and to do something about it!

For example, we have set up a specific home screen, which shows each project manager an overview of his or her current projects and the associated indicators, classified by status, type, etc. This interface, which met the expectations of our teams, has led to real productivity gains, while making work more comfortable.

Illustration image Sciforma 7.1 - Customised space screen: work element.

All this has also made it possible to standardise and improve project management practices. Of course, we have teams of professional project managers, but other user profiles also contribute to projects. As a result, not everyone was at the same level when it came to project management, and different ways of working coexisted as best they could.

The introduction of Sciforma provides an ideal opportunity to review methodologies and institutionalise shared practices. We have not yet reached our overall maturity in terms of project management, but the deployment of Sciforma is making a major contribution to that.

Our customers rely on our company to produce critical parts for their own business. As a PMO, our responsibility is to ensure that our projects are managed in a way that delivers the highest quality products, on time. And that's what Sciforma helps us to ensure.

As head of the PMO, what role did you play in the deployment of Sciforma at Aubert & Duval?

Arnaud Montels:

Well, the PMO initiated and steered the initiative from start to finish, and we continue to bring the solution to life on a daily basis.

The PMO: a multi-faceted function

A PMO is more than just a control tower to punish breaches of procedure. At Aubert & Duval, we wanted an active PMO. The PMO reports directly to the Industrial Development Department, which makes it a cross-functional role that acts as a bridge between the different teams, as well as between the decision-makers and the field.

Illustration image Sciforma 7.1 - Project portfolio view with health index.

While our PMO is responsible for implementing the methodology and overseeing the progress of projects, it also plays a host of other important roles.

For management, the PMO is the guarantor of data quality and integrity; it provides the relevant indicators, can guide decision-making, and helps to select or prioritise projects to implement the strategy.

The PMO must also play the role of adviser, coach and support to users , listening to their needs so that they can respond by developing or adapting the appropriate functionalities or procedures .

The importance of long-term support

As part of the deployment of Sciforma, the technical configuration of the tool represented only a small part of our work. It was essentially the management of change within a community of multi-site, multi-skilled engineering teams that mobilised our energies.

To do this, we relied on the Sciforma teams, and on those of their certified partner ASI, with whom we had ourselves established a long-term partnership.

These external experts were brought in to support the PMO, to answer users' needs and questions, and to train and inform the project managers. And they continue to support us over the long term to help us develop both our methods and the software, with a view to continuous improvement. Sciforma's functional modularity, which lends itself to specific parameterisations, is a great plus in this respect.

See all software Project Portfolio Management (PPM)

A few lessons from the history of Aubert & Duval

To serve their customers well and create value, a growing number of companies and organisations need to optimise the management of their projects. This is true in the design and development of new products, especially in complex markets, but it also applies more widely to all economic players, whatever their sector of activity, and whatever their size. When it comes to optimising value creation and ROI, project management represents a formidable lever for improvement.

The role of the PMO, or those responsible for project management, then becomes critical. While a tool is not everything, it is becoming increasingly important for the PMO to be able to rely on a robust and appropriate software solution, which will help it to fully play its structuring and facilitating role, and enable it to accelerate and improve projects to better serve the company's strategy.

Sponsored article. The expert contributors are authors who are independent of the appvizer editorial team. Their comments and positions are their own.