Building an agile project management environment to align with a corporate move to digital transformation and increased customer focus.
Claro is part of América Móvil. With 280 million mobile customers, 29 million fixed broadband customers, 33 million fixed lines, and 21 million pay TV customers, it is the largest telecommunications company in Latin America.
Claro is a company in transformation to become fully customer-centric. Its strategic pillars of network performance, customer experience, innovation, and data-driven focus directly link to its new push towards digital transformation. In support of this commitment, the organization wanted to create a companywide and value-driven view of projects, rather than the existing departmental and execution focused project management. Patricia Trigilio, Portfolio Manager at Claro, explains further: “To move to a more agile project management environment we realized we needed help. SAFe 5.0 is a world-leading framework for scaling agile across the enterprise. Building our transformation around SAFe gave us a great way to empower our individual teams, supported by certification and training. Part of our challenge was that we needed to include traditional and agile projects in a hybrid project management environment to reflect our reality.”
Patricia Trigilio – PORTFOLIO MANAGER
Claro
In a large organization such as Claro, moving to an agile way of working requires cultural change and is often a multi-year effort. The strategy had executive support from the start, as it was clear to leadership that this initiative would help support data-driven decision making and improve customer satisfaction to remain firm market leaders. Trigilio and the team saw the need for cutting-edge software to deliver on this promise.
After an extensive market evaluation, Claro decided that Micro Focus Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) and Micro Focus ALM Octane provide the ideal combination. PPM joins workflows with data to align investment with business strategy. ALM Octane supports agile team collaboration and high-quality application delivery. Strong integration between the solutions gives Claro the single consistent view and two-way communications needed for comprehensive and effective enterprise-wide portfolio and lifecycle management.
Soon a short three-month implementation project was underway. “The integration between PPM and ALM Octane was simple,” says Trigilio. “Our users don’t need any technical knowledge: they can decide when and how to integrate their projects and just focus on the business value.”
Claro’s product portfolio was introduced to PPM in an end-to-end process, from idea through to project completion. Each strategic pillar is represented as a product portfolio in PPM. Sub-portfolios represent business objectives. Each of these objectives has a sub portfolio with measurable KPIs. These roll into a ‘portfolio epic’, or program, that is synchronized from PPM into ALM Octane. The integration between PPM and ALM Octane allows the business strategy, objectives, schedule milestones, and KPIs to be managed in PPM, while the execution is managed in ALM Octane. The top-level strategic portfolio provides full visibility of both traditional and agile projects.
Patricia Trigilio – PORTFOLIO MANAGER
Claro
Moving from a scattered agile approach with isolated initiatives, Claro quickly moved to an integrated agile model where multiple projects are aligned with a common goal. This scalable model leads to the near future, where all project initiatives will be synchronized with measurable KPI-led benefits.
PPM and ALM Octane did not require any functional customization which helps maintain a frequent upgrade schedule. Adopting an established and proven methodology, such as SAFe, provides a great kickstart. Because the Micro Focus solutions are fully SAFe compliant, the out-of-the-box processes worked perfectly.
“Our portfolios are structured to align solution and strategy with a focus on agile scalability,” adds Trigilio. “We wanted to associate measurable benefits with project delivery. To enhance this even more, we are working to integrate our PPM and ALM Octane solution into a Business Intelligence (BI) solution so that we can easily create financial dashboards directly linked to project milestones. We can also produce strategy reports providing insight into the financial impact of a release date change, or a change in one of our benefits. Having this data at our fingertips supports strategic decision making.”
“Having executive sponsorship really helped bring this issue to the right corporate level,” says Trigilio. “It meant that we could elevate the program without any departmental or business-level customizations. This is the only way for us to deliver the data-driven results we wanted.”
“Strong partnership was a critical success factor for us,” Trigilio confirms. “We worked closely with our implementation partner Dinamo TI and really appreciated their expertise and collaborative attitude. Working with Micro Focus in understanding the potential and strength of PPM and ALM Octane confirmed that this is the right choice for us. We are confident that our motto of ‘start small but evolve fast’ will bring us future success.”
