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Evolving consumer expectations

With more banks, financial institutions and private companies offering consumers same-day responses on credit applications, demand for rapid access to accurate, up-to-the-minute consumer credit information has increased dramatically in recent years.

To keep pace with changing consumer expectations, KKB is on a mission to step up operational efficiency and boost productivity – a move that will help the organization enable banks to provide convenient, responsive customer services. As its project management solution forms the bedrock of its daily activities, KKB targeted this system as a key area for development and innovation.

Özkan Öncü, Senior Project Portfolio Manager at KKB, explains: “We were using many different solutions to support project management and relied heavily on tracking progress with spreadsheets. While this approach enabled us to keep our operations running smoothly, it provided limited visibility into the performance of each project, increased the risk of errors and significantly slowed our auditing processes.”

With very little alignment between IT and its project management goals, KKB found it increasingly difficult to prioritize key workflows and optimize its use of internal resources. As a result, the organization struggled to create detailed roadmaps for all of its project management workflows – hampering productivity.

OPTiiM helped us every step of the way, showing us on how we could get the most out of the Micro Focus (now part of OpenText™) solution and how we could further develop our project management capabilities.

Creating a central hub for project management

To help employees boost efficiency, KKB decided to replace its existing multi-vendor project management solutions with Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) from OpenText™.

Özkan Öncü continues: “We chose to step up our project management activities with Micro Focus (now part of OpenText™) PPM because it had the rich functionality required to provide a centralized project management system, while also offering us the ability to adapt the solution to our unique needs by integrating it with third-party applications.”

To ensure adherence to best practices during the deployment, KKB enlisted the help of experienced PPM systems integrator OPTiiM. As PPM offered all of the required functionality “out of the box”, the partner was able to deploy the solution without customizations, helping to simplify ongoing maintenance and future upgrades. With OPTiiM’s support, KKB created new, standardized project management workflows and configured the OpenText™ solution to automate key workflows and provide detailed reporting for Time and Resource management. KKB also uses the Demand, Project and Portfolio modules of PPM.

“OPTiiM helped us every step of the way, showing us on how we could get the most out of the Micro Focus (now part of OpenText™) solution and how we could further develop our project management capabilities,” continues Özkan Öncü. “For instance, we were keen to create a solution that could automatically spot anomalies in our project management system and prompt users to correct any issues. OPTiiM developed an anomaly detection tool that automatically scans PPM for missing information, incomplete workflows, or data entry errors.”

Based on business rules and the company’s standards, the tool suggests to users what needs to be done to resolve the personal and team anomalies. This helps the organization to ensure that all critical information is up to date, issues and incomplete information gaps are reduced, and projects and demands managed based on best practices within the company’s standards.

To accelerate uptake of the anomaly detection tool, OPTiiM introduced an element of gamification, as Özkan Öncü explains: “To encourage users to proactively resolve anomalous entries, we designed a system that would award employees points for each issue they fixed and deduct points for every anomaly they left unresolved. To gamify this, we followed a chess-like game scenario, whereby players get awarded new chess pieces when they level up after resolving project management system errors.”

Embracing the gamification approach motivated employees to fix errors and ensure up-to-date information in PPM, producing a marked reduction in anomalous entries.

OPTiiM also integrated its own portfolio planning solution – Aangine – with KKB’s PPM environment. Aangine complements PPM at the project portfolio level, helping KKB to automate portfolio planning processes through powerful what-if scenario modeling and AI-powered portfolio and resource optimization algorithms.

Unlocking greater efficiency

Since transforming its project management operations with PPM, KKB has increased the number of projects it can manage annually by more than 22% – 98 in 2020 versus 80 in 2019 – while also ensuring that more projects are delivered on time – helping to keep its clients satisfied.

“With much greater visibility across all our projects, we’ve been able to measure impressive productivity improvements since going live with the Micro Focus (now part of OpenText™) solution,” says Özkan Öncü. “Using Micro Focus (now part of OpenText™) PPM, we now deliver 80 percent of our projects on time, even though we have increased the number of projects in our portfolio by 22 percent. What’s more, we’ve shortened our product development time by 30 percent, helping us bring innovations to our clients more regularly.”

Overall, KKB has calculated that the productivity gains it has achieved with PPM and Aangine are equivalent to hiring up to 20 additional full time employees. Productivity will rise further once KKB achieves its plan of deploying an autonomous project management assistant that will automate routine activities, assist end users through a chatbot, and use AI and Machine Learning to predict demands and allocate the appropriate human resources.

Özkan Öncü, concludes: “With Micro Focus (now part of OpenText™)PPM underpinning our project management activities, we can manage our time and resources more effectively and adapt our projects as our plans change. We’re keen to continue our partnership with Micro Focus (now part of OpenText™) and OPTiiM in the years ahead as we continue to enhance our capabilities and help banks deliver award-winning service.”

Using PPM, we now deliver 80 percent of our projects on time, even though we have increased the number of projects in our portfolio by 22 percent. What’s more, we’ve shortened our product development time by 30 percent.