ITC Infotech delivers services across a wide range of industries, including banking, financial services, hospitality, insurance, manufacturing, media and entertainment, retail, transportation and logistics, and travel.

As an Oracle Platinum Partner, ITC Infotech makes extensive use of Oracle technology and applications to deliver IT solutions. The company has four dedicated development centers in India, as well as offices and delivery centers in North America, Europe, and the Asia Pacific region. ITC Infotech also runs centers of excellence. One of these centers, based in Bangalore, focuses on IT project management.

Until May 2011, ITC Infotech was using multiple applications to manage software development projects. The company used Oracle’s PeopleSoft Financials 9.0 as the main information repository, and other third-party systems and tools to capture and monitor project performance. As a result, it was a challenge to integrate information for aggregated reporting.

These disparate applications could not provide a consolidated view of available resources or reporting to help the company plan ahead. This created challenges when deploying technical and managerial resources for projects.

Project visibility was also an issue as the collated information did not reconcile the differences between a project’s plan and what was happening during the software development lifecycle or as part of application maintenance and support. As a result, this information was hard to track.

In November 2011, ITC Infotech installed Oracle’s Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management Release 8.1. The new system allows seamless integration with PeopleSoft Financials 9.0, increases project visibility, enhances human resource planning, improves project completion time and reduces costs through closer monitoring, and it creates a consolidated view of a project portfolio or customer account.

“The Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management system also delivers a consolidated view of projects and resources through configurable dashboards and allows two-way integration with PeopleSoft Financials 9.0, using out-of-the box templates,” said G. Lakshminarayanan, vice president—Project Management Center of Excellence, ITC Infotech India Ltd. “This seamless integration enabled us to closely monitor our projects’ progress and we expect to reduce overall project management time by 10% to 15%.”

ITC Infotech uses different tools in managing its projects. At the core of the organization is PeopleSoft Financials 9.0, which was implemented in 2008. This application is used for human capital management, enterprise service automation, financial management, and supply chain planning.

ITC Infotech provides services, such as systems integration, product customization, product implementation, customer application development and testing, and mobile solutions. Most of these engagements are either fixed-price engagements—with defined specifications from the outset—or time and material engagements, where the project scope cannot be defined at the start.

ITC Infotech engages with customers in various ways. The company provides consulting services, manages stages of a project lifecycle, executes full-lifecycle projects, and manages whole IT implementations and upgrades, including planning, scheduling, and monitoring.

Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management Release 8.1 provides seamless integration with the existing PeopleSoft Financials 9.0 data repository and other external tools for data collection—such as defect management tools—through configurable dashboards and views.

The two-way integration between the ERP and Primavera systems enables the entire project creation and resource allocation to be transferred into Primavera, creating a consolidated view of HR and project status. This improves the project resource planning, resource assignment, and scheduling process, and it helps deliver projects as planned.

ITC Infotech also completes projects’ work breakdown structure and building activities using the Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management system.

Automating project management processes and providing a consolidated view of resources reduces a project’s time-to-market and helps managers closely monitor its progress.

ITC Infotech previously had to make a significant effort to integrate relevant information for aggregated reporting on projects, due to the number of applications in use. The company was using a third-party application for project planning, but the project teams’ time sheet information was captured in PeopleSoft Financials 9.0.

Project managers had to spend substantial time extracting project information, such as work progress and hours spent, from the various tools. A weekly project status report would take at least two hours to compile. For the monthly project management report, it could take up to two and a half days to collate all the required information.

ITC Infotech uses Primavera P6 Enterprise Project Portfolio Management Release 8.1 to improve its reporting process and project visibility. The system enables project managers to use quantitative project management measures that allow the company to analyze the differences between a project’s plan and its actual progress. It also provides dashboards that indicate a project’s status, and this facilitates a project review and any necessary actions, such as assigning extra technical personnel or deploying additional time to complete a project.

The company can now generate weekly project status reports online almost immediately after staff enter time sheet and project scheduling information. It also expects to significantly reduce the time taken to generate monthly project management reports.

The improved reporting process and project visibility is expected to reduce project management time by 10% to 15%.

ITC Infotech’s IT projects are run in silos and are executed differently for each customer. Previously, there was little interaction between the project managers and no uniformity in the way activities, such as system design, programming, and testing were planned for fixed-price, full lifecycle project engagements.

The lack of consolidation between projects meant there was no aggregated reporting, and project portfolios or customer accounts could be viewed only one at a time. Also, stakeholder reporting used ad hoc methods that provided only limited visibility about a project’s progress, costs, and expected completion date.

By standardizing a project’s structure and the way the projects team’s time is captured, the company can now extract key data, such as team effort, schedules, and other metrics, from a single source and generate aggregated reports, including weekly project status reports, almost immediately.

This enables managers to make more informed decisions about how best to address project delays, review issues, take corrective measures, and allocate resources to a project to ensure it is completed on time.

The system also enables managers from each part of the business to immediately view project status and allows them to provide progress reports and other information to stakeholders in a more detailed and timely manner.