The client, a US wireless service provider, did not have visibility into the fund utilization and return on investments for network enhancement projects. The network, for a wireless telecom service provider, is the source of core revenue generation and the projects are worth billions of dollars.
The executives of the company spent a lot of time compiling information from various vendors and projecting the health of the project and anticipating the changed timelines. So as the timelines were being pushed out and milestones moved, it was difficult to establish change control, and figure out the root cause of the delays. A mature solution was missing. Progress was reported and tracked on excel sheets. The vendors did not proactively share information with the company. There was no common Project Management System. The systems had latent data reported from vendors.
The Project monitoring group began facing the following problems:
The telecom company provided contracts to vendors for EPC (Engineering, Procurement, and Construction) activities. A fixed budget was allocated per vendor and the utilization of that budget had to be tracked. It was difficult to track the vendors and the utilization of their budgets. Importantly pay points were linked to milestones.
A common project management and profitability tracking system that could monitor all the vendors was felt to be the need of the hour.
Cognos v8.4 & 10.1
Microsoft SQL Server 2005, 2008
SQL Server Integration Services