ENGAGEMENT
A major global online travel organization received additional investment funding and resources to meet regulatory and business objectives not previously managed internally by the security team. The organizational leader engaged DayBlink Consulting to accelerate his strategic program management efforts.
PROBLEM
The security organization of a global online travel company was in the process of a large re-organization that brought Information Security, Physical Security and Privacy into one overarching business organization. As a result, the workload being managed by the Security PMO significantly and immediately increased. Security leadership wanted a “single pane of glass” view into ongoing, planned and backlogged projects and initiatives that could be reviewed at the Executive level, while also detailed enough to support tactical decision making.
Security teams had previously been governed in silos, so bringing team updates to an aggregated leadership level required change management and governance to ensure that this program was set up for long term success and would not crumble under its own weight after the initial accelerated effort.
SOLUTION
DayBlink Consulting rapidly kicked off a wide-reaching effort to catalog all existing work across the security organization, meeting with all individual team leads and project owners to collect their information. We then created detailed initiative profiles which enabled a standardized view of projects, ownership, type of effort (executive vs. tactical) and detailed status reporting.
In parallel with the discovery effort, our team quickly stood up a lightweight methodology for ongoing incremental updates to this Program Portfolio, creating an easy-to-use toolset that did not require any advanced user training or access requests. “Week Zero” updates were held as live working sessions with all initiative leads to ensure that the correct information was being captured, and also to ensure that updates were simple and not admin-intensive.
Our Cyber and Automation team developed an interactive BI-tool that leveraged the underlying Program Portfolio database. All reporting and visualizations were catered to an executive audience, but with traceability down to the individual project and initiative level for detailed project management and synergy with existing PMO tools like Jira. Our team also created a detailed playbook for the PMO team to leverage in order to manage, facilitate, and lead incremental program updates across all teams and current projects, with a focus on identifying projects that had executive-level blockers or projects that were tied to business objectives but were not funded or resourced.
The newly developed Program Portfolio framework and toolset was designed to be easy to use for cyber technologists and did not require additional admin overhead time that can typically bog down project efforts. Even upon completion of our engagement, teams were completing incremental project updates on their own with the automated notifications put in place and leave-behind training materials.
RESULT
We profiled and helped automated status reporting for more than 50 in-flight and planned initiatives, reducing time spent on manual reporting work by more than 90% and enabling an always-available and up-to-date Portfolio Status Dashboard. Increased leadership visibility spurred improved on-time project completion of all initiatives over the following year.