Client Case Study
Our client’s situation:
The Information Technology department of our North America carrier client embarked on a strategic, multi-year initiative aimed at reducing maintenance costs and decreasing time-to-market for new product features by retiring legacy business and operational support systems within their portfolio and migrating customer account inventory, service, and billing data to target architecture platforms.
How we approached the issue:
Utilizing deep subject matter expertise in program and project management best practices as well as telecommunications industry expertise, Cartesian launched and operated the program management office for the client’s multi-year legacy system retirement initiative.
What we did to help:
Over an eight-year period, Cartesian’s program management office drove to completion 250+ individual software development and data migration projects through the following tasks:
- Created and maintained project schedules, managed individual project budgets
- Formed project teams, facilitated task assignments, tracked status and completion
- Delivered monthly a multi-year financial view including: budget, actual costs, variance and analysis, outlook, and benefits
- Maintained the business case, prepared, submitted, and tracked project funding requests through corporate financial planning systems
- Analyzed risks, developed mitigation plans, resolved issues, assessed the impacts of projects in jeopardy, and led stakeholders through decision gates
- Prepared and presented weekly program-level status and monthly Plan of Record executive reviews; chaired program change control and executive governance boards
The end result:
As knowledgeable and objective program leads, Cartesian identified and worked through numerous scope changes that improved the business case for the program. Over an eight-year period, we successfully delivered software development and data migration projects that retired over 556 legacy systems with an annual cost savings of over $324M.