Feedback on the management of investment projects at Geneva Airport

How do you manage the project portfolio of a facility handling 17.9 million passengers a year? For over 5 years, the PPM software Project Monitor has been supporting the Project Coordination Department (the project management unit of Geneva Airport) in monitoring its activities. The PMO has a cross-functional role, carrying out activities and actions for all Geneva Airport departments. Read their feedback.

Speakers:

Find out more in this article:

Génère Aéroport - Key figures

Financial information for 2019 :

*Key figures for 2019

Internal organization and key challenges

Organizing project coordination

Geneva International Airport is located in a small canton with a confined and restricted space: a single runway with one access road to the outside. It therefore seems essential to optimize space as much as possible.

In terms of project coordination, the PMO has a cross-functional role and will carry out activities and actions for all Geneva Airport departments.

Project management at Geneva Airport takes a very budgetary approach, and is mainly carried out by the financial professions. Projects are called "investments" and are really considered as such.

Within the DCP, all professions will interact through collaboration, whatever their specificity.

PPM software Project Monitor supports the airport's Project Coordination Department

279 active projects in 2019, including :

Major investment projects underway

Large-scale projects are handled at Project Monitor and span several years. These projects will be steered and supervised by numerous players. This enables us to see, among other things, how the projects evolve over time and, above all, how they fit into the geographic space of Geneva Airport.

It should be noted that this type of project will require a much higher level of monitoring than the others. The aim is to capitalize on the way in which these projects are managed, so that all projects can benefit.

Implementation and key success factors

#1 A mature organization open to change

The use of Project Monitor is possible and interesting when the organization has reached a certain level of maturity, and when change support is provided both within and outside the tool.

#2 A desire to raise users

At Geneva Airport, the evolution has been gradual.

The first year of deployment saw the technical implementation of the tool, as well as internal communication and evangelism. The user community was not IT-savvy, but motivated to become so. The community of project managers had a very different way of working. There was a real effort to support change. The important thing was to have a community of users who were aware of project management and who understood the need to centralize and synthesize data in order to help decision-making.

In the second year, the emphasis was on developing and exploiting all the modules to best meet all needs.

 " Project Monitor provides support for Change Management. We free up a lot of time on the analytical side. To support users, the airport's Project Coordination Department organized training sessions, documents and lean meetings with the teams".

#3 Setting up strategic prioritization forms

At the start of each project, a prioritization form will be filled in by the beneficiary, who will reflect on his expression of need and see if it fits in with the strategic plan.

The form will therefore focus on 3 key strategies: customer satisfaction, economic sustainability and platform operability.

Validate project stages through Workflows

Project validation has been deployed on Project Monitor through a workflow. This means that a succession of tasks and actions must be carried out before a project's budget is validated and its status changed.

ppm software project life cycle

Resource management on Project Monitor

The initial aim was to be able to measure the activity of every person involved in a project, so that it could be valued in terms of investment. Today, the scope has been broadened to enable us to measure all activities.

Monitoring will also enable us to measure future staffing requirements, in particular through planning.

Discover functionality

Galileo and project portfolio management

Candidate projects are managed via the "draft" status. All these projects will be stored for a future need that will potentially go through a validation process.

The advantage was to centralize expressions of need, which were initially carried out by e-mail and/or in Excel.

The hierarchies made it possible to categorize and list the beneficiary portfolios, which correspond to the business sponsors who each have envelopes to finance the projects.
The advantage is that this reduced the number of meetings and made the beneficiaries autonomous in managing the information in their perimeters.

Galileo, Project Monitor 's business intelligence module, is used to help supervise portfolios. This datamart can be used to generate reports, with ETL integration with Business Object, and thus to compare elements.

Datamart Galilée - BI, Dashboarding and reporting

Dashboards were used to understand and evaluate data quality at Project Monitor.

Concrete benefits :

Implementing a well-thought-out user support process

Set up specific interactions with Geneva Airport's IT department:

This operation was greatly improved and made possible thanks to the frequency and regularity of interactions with Virage experts. This enabled a rapid increase in skills and the exploitation of the tool's full potential.

Key benefits of portfolio management software Project Monitor

" Project Monitor centralizes and records information for decision-making purposes" "Traceability of information enables feedback".

profits geneva

Sign up for our next webinars!

💌 News, trends, information, views, events... for CIO, PMO, and IT project managers in SMEs, public bodies and large corporations.

Register for conferences