Feedback from DPD Group / Geopost on the implementation of Project Monitor

DPD experience feedback Group

DPDGroup takes center stage at PM CLUB 2021! Laure OMNES, PMO at CIO, gave a rich feedback on the implementation of Project Monitor.

Read about DPD's testimonial in this article Group :

DPDGroup, Europe's No. 1 express parcel company

DPD Group, a subsidiary of the La Poste group, handles the transport, tracking and delivery of parcels and documents entrusted to it by French and international companies on a daily basis.

Europe's largest parcel delivery network hits a record in 2020 with sales of 11 billion euros. This time... "thank you COVID" 😊 This business boom is reflected in a proportional growth in the project portfolio.

DPD Group key figures:

New project governance supported by PPM software

"When I took over as PMO, my first challenge consisted of one question: How do I get a global view of all our projects? Put another way, what are we really doing? "

In response to this changing environment, DPD's CIO Group launched Project Monitor. The Group operates in an international and multicultural context. The Information Systems Department, although a support function, is no exception. It is spread over several sites in several countries, i.e. several legal entities. As for the Group's customers and subsidiaries, they are spread all over the world.

There's a need for rationalization and transparency in project management. In other words, to understand "who's working on what and for whom", and ultimately, to improve resource tracking.

DPD Group simultaneously implemented the PPM platform and the new project governance system. The challenge was to obtain a 360° view of projects, fed by clear and fluid feedback. To achieve this, DPD's new CIO Group chose VIRAGE Group to manage its project portfolio.

6 weeks for delivery of the project platform

At DPD Group, we deliver projects with the same obsession for fast parcel delivery. The project to set up Project Monitor was done in commando mode!

Just 6 weeks after the kick-off meeting, project tracking was up and running at Project Monitor. The PPM platform Project Monitor arrived on project managers' workstations in record time.

The project team began by optimizing the standard tracking structures, in particular schedule and phases. This rationalization enabled the database to be quickly initialized with all projects. All that then remained to be done was to train and roll out to the project teams. By January 2020, 100% of CIO resources were able to track their time.

300 active users; 6 different sites; 6 different calendars (public holidays, vacations...); but 1 common language, English, and 1 common tool : Project Monitor

Whatever the type of resource - in-house, external or fixed-price service provider - they all enter their time in order to have an overall view of the volume/day per project, across 3 main categories of activity:

Daily use, to keep up with the highlights of project governance

"As a PMO, Project Monitor is always open, all the time, every day...and I'm obviously not the only one using it!"

The Home Page Project Monitor is built around one value: transparency. All resources have access to similar data: project weather forecasts, shortcuts to projects.... The Projects Home Page provides a quick overview of start and end dates, project teams, assigned stakeholders and workloads since launch.

STEERCO PROJET steering committee

COMOP, COPRO, COPIL PROJET ... at DPD Group, the portfolio steering committee is called STEERCO PROJET.

Upstream (on Project Monitor), to prepare this monthly monitoring of projects (in addition to the resource and project cockpits), each project manager answers a questionnaire, called "follow up", which covers various points such as :

These items of information, added to the updated schedule and exported as PPTs, are used as presentation aids and thus considered a goldmine for the smooth running of Steerco Projet.

The magic of the portfolio: 50 projects dealt with by CODIR

And when it comes to discussions on the Group's challenges projects, Project Monitor 's Portfolio and Slideshow functions set the pace. For their project review, members of DPD's IT CODIR Group select the projects they wish to discuss. The slideshow function enlivens the proceedings.

Within CIO, several types of portfolios have been created, depending on the department. The aim is to adjust the parameters and indicators specific to each department and the project methodology observed: volume of projects, breakdown by status, schedule of projects, weathero....

"On average, we review around fifty projects. All in 2 hours".

A powerful tool for animating and prioritizing projects in the portfolio, the "slide show" function reveals key indicators, comments, risks, schedule, remaining milestones, number of days spent... all of which facilitates the decision-making process in the executive committee.

"The key function of the magazines: the ADD button. It lets you take notes directly at the meeting. It saves me time on minutes, and gives me visibility on all decisions! When we redo the project review, we use the notes from the previous CODIR. This ensures traceability on the progress of identified actions.

As for the execution committees, since the subjects discussed are announced upstream, each member can access a global view of his Portfolio by extracting the summary sheet from Project Monitor to monitor project progress KPIs (number of man-days spent on a given geographical site, volume of man-days spent on architecture, activities with the highest workload, etc.).

Project Monitorthe basis for internal rebilling

Still manual and time-consuming to date, internal re-invoicing at DPD Group will soon be facilitated by automation thanks to the introduction of the Datamart.

As PMO, Laure OMNES needs to see how many man-days have been spent on such and such a project for such and such a country... Each project therefore has an input allocation key, while each resource is attached to a profile with its own TJM, which is the basis for re-invoicing; re-invoicing can be 100% financed by the group or spread over several sites.

What does the future hold for DPD Group ?

FIX cartoon - DPD Group

What can we learn from Project Monitor at DPDGroup?