Clients & Case Studies
Case Study 2
World’s Largest Global Financial Services Organization –Saves $200 million by introducing function point counting to manage large projects.
Successfully Managing Large Projects
The CIO for a global Corporate and Investment Banking financial firm, embarked on developing a system to manage the work output of the firm’s 7,000 technologists. He decided to build a custom tool that could provide the exact status of each project, how the cost of the project compared to its budget, the level of customer satisfaction after the project was completed and a wide range of information not related to specific projects but needed for decision making.
The CIO led the development of a Systems and Technology Information Center (SYSTIC) system (a pseudo name for confidentiality purposes). SYSTIC was designed for performance improvement, knowledge sharing and standardization of all metrics important to performance improvement. The SYSTIC model was designed to provide real-time measurement of productivity, quality and control throughout the organization.
Need For a Common Measurement of Effort
One of the greatest challenges for the tool and organization was the issue of measuring productivity, which in turn required accurate estimation of the magnitude of each project. The commonly used lines of code measurement method tends to reward profligate design and penalize concise design. Source lines of code also cannot be used for normalizing across platforms, with different languages or by organization.
The CIO looked at the available methodologies and their individual nuances and, with DCG help, determined that function points provided the best methodology to get to a unit of work in the development organization.
DCG helped the client define productivity using function point delivery rates, while quality was defined as customer satisfaction based on surveys compiled after the project is delivered. Control measurements were based on the success of each group in meeting organizational goals. For example, it would track a manager’s success in meeting a commitment to improve the security of a group of applications.
The use of function points to measure the size and percentage of completion of a project involves a major training challenge in that managers throughout the organization need to understand the function point methodology, and an infrastructure is required to audit measurement accuracy.
Changing the Mindset of the Organization
The CIO said that the development of the function point measurement methodology proved to be one of the most challenging aspects of the project because the use of the function points required a major change in the mindset of most of the managers in his organization. Most managers previously estimated projects using the seat of the pants methods based on their own experience. He further discovered that the support of function points in the field required getting his entire 7,000 person organization, and especially its hundreds of projects managers, to understand and competently use the function point methodology as their primary project measurement tool. He initiated a campaign to train his people on function points and why they were being used, set up a formal training program and developed a process that was embedded into the new tools to capture function point measurements at every stage of the cost estimation and delivery process.
Trying to get the project managers into the mindset of using a consistent metric across the organization was a major challenge. The client worked with, David Consulting Group, to develop customized training classes along with coaching and mentoring. The classes introduced the function point methodology and fit that methodology into the measurement practices necessary to support SYSTIC. The hundreds of client personnel, who took the course and received the necessary training, immediately began measuring function points and incorporating the results into the vehicles that fed information into SYSTIC. The examples and exercises in the course were based on actual client systems with which they were familiar.
Infrastructure for Audit and Accountability
Once the mind-set was changed and the process included functional sizing in application development and maintenance, DCG continued working with the client in an audit and advisory role helping improve internal competencies in function point usage through coaching, mentoring and consulting.
Cost Savings and Improvement in On-time Delivery
Management tools such as SYSTIC have the potential to enable substantial performance and cost improvements for Global 1000 IT departments struggling to manage large numbers of projects with diminished resources. In the case of this client, the proportion of on-time projects increased from 60% to 80% through the ability of the SYSTIC system to identify scheduling problems while there is still time to get them back on track. Schedules were more realistic because they were sized objectively through function points and productivity tracking was standardized as well. The CIO was also able to cut about $200 million from his group’s budget through better management of people and projects.