Eliminating nasty surprises
June 2008

Alan Hesketh dislikes surprises. In fact he hates them. As General Manager of IT, he has to maintain a high level of credibility to be accepted by the business. He wanted software that not only provided world class project management, but also a solution that would eliminate surprises.

Progressive enterprises hold half of New Zealand’s grocery market under leading names: Foodtown, Woolworths and Countdown. They have 150 supermarkets nationwide and employ 18,000 staff. The IT Business Unit have up to 40 projects on the go at any one time.

What Alan and his team love about Control is being able to quickly detect issues and action them before they escalate. The ability to define levels of project risk allows the team to access, prioritise and escalate them to the appropriate person.

“We can be proactive about dealing with any potential problems early on. We know if something is going wrong and are able to do something about it.”

Furthermore, the past projects historical data is archived in a Central Data Repository. Alan and his team always have data available to ‘learn from the past’ and make sure active projects are delivered on time.

“Every time we look at projects, we ask, ‘Are we delivering the outcomes?’. We go through project results and measure their performance from the status information flowing out of Control.”

“I rarely go into senior management meetings not knowing what is going on, or being in the dark about a silent ‘killer’ issue. Control makes it easier to report through to the IT Steering Committee – rather than ringing around 20 people.”