Case Study: Defence ERP Program- Department of Defence

Client: Department of Defence

Dates: Jul 2019-Jun 2020

Project Type: Strategy, Digital

Background

This case study covers most of the department’s reform areas with more emphasis on communication and stakeholder engagement, culture and leadership, technology and data and analytics. PMLogic successfully transitioned all support to Defence and System Integrator teams in June 2020.

The Defence ERP Program is a $1.2 billion 10 year program. It’s not just an I.T. project, it’s not just about implementing SAP. It’s about totally transforming the way Defence operate through overturning the ERP system, particularly how information is captured, protected and disseminated.

Approach

As strategic advisors, PMO and Portfolio Project Management Tool development team of 10, PMLogic re-set the Defence $1.2b ERP Program governance and controls following finance gateway and internal reviews highlighting many issues and risks that needed resolving for the program to be successful.

Outcomes

Some of the challenges we solved included:

• removing under-performing team members from well recognised consultancies replacing with team members who have the right mindset, knowledge and skills

• automation of an administrative paper based reporting process that was consulting team labour intensive (expensive) and not able to keep up with reporting requirements

• moving from a project centric to an outcome centric approach, establishing fit for purpose governance arrangements that allowed program flexibility to adapt to emerging requirements but still aligned to achieving cardinal milestones

• mapping dependencies and contributing to prioritisation of the many elements of the program

• establishing and configuring the program management tool based on PMLogic’s SIP (Strategy Implementation Platform) to significantly reduces the effort in reporting, improve quality and meaning of reports through trend analysis and reporting user behaviour

• scheduling stakeholder engagement workshops and establishing information repositories

• facilitating whole of Defence enterprise-level risk workshops to assess program delivery risks on key milestones being delivered (assessing change impact) and not being delivered (assessing contingency plans)

• defining architectural, information and security governance and management

• gaining agreement on program roles and responsibilities, including terms of reference, program steering committee and sponsorship, product and systems ownership, program streams and team as well as involvement of stakeholders

• resource management including subject matter experts, environments, facilitates and equipment

• automating information capture from the master schedule and reporting to ensure continuous alignment to Defence strategic objectives

• training and on-boarding a fulltime Defence team and the selected System Integrator with over 250 staff training the program teams in the program ways of working

• working with the Defence and the program leadership executives to configure the program tool and dashboard to meet their information needs, maintaining a single source of truth and weekly update and reporting principles.

These significant improvements established a reliable, repeatable, transparent and sustainable program delivery framework maximising the chances of program success supported by a gateway review suggesting the approach the ERP Program in governance and automation should be adapted across the whole of Defence.