Fortis Bank has completed its two-year IT merger programme in Belgium, using technology from UK-based The Program Management Group (PMG).
The merger programme, which was completed to the exact date and timescale originally specified, involved the migration and integration of hundreds of systems.
PMG's Hydra product helped Fortis Bank to model and predict where IT resource bottlenecks could occur well before they would become critical. It also offered alternative scenarios to allow the organisation to handle and resolve the complex interactions involving hundreds of staff and contractors, says the company.
Hydra's delegation model works by enabling senior managers to delegate packages of work to other managers. At the lowest level of the hierarchy, detailed plans contain tasks, which are allocated to individual employees. The data in the low level, detailed plans, is automatically consolidated into the higher-level plans. At the highest level the programme office maintains an overall, departmental programme plan, which is kept up to date by the consolidation of data from below. All levels of management have access to relevant and up to date pictures of their forecast effort together with a good idea of the development schedule for all of their projects.
Benny Brems of Fortis Bank, comments: "Adopting programme management techniques helps us to manage complex sets of projects more efficiently and predictably than with traditional project management tools."