PowerSteering – helps makes a sweet partnership… sweeter

Business Needs

In the early 2010s British Sugar embarked on a new business initiative focused on Continuous Improvement. As a subsidiary of one of the largest international food production companies, British Sugar needed a way to streamline project governance, reduce overall related waste and finally provide visibility to other areas of the business. What began as a way for British Sugar to get a handle on potential business transformation initiatives, matured into a central hub for projects across the organization.

The Solution

British Sugar adopted Upland PowerSteering as a tool at the start of their Continuous Improvement journey. With PowerSteering’s ability to help simplify and streamline processes, alongside the maturity of British Sugars own related PMO, what started as just a tool quickly became a guiding assistant across all business functions.

Benefits:

• PowerSteering’s ability to create one central source of truth promotes organizational accountability for change and enables parameter setting to ensure every project has a clear link to organizational strategy
• Transparent, versatile and dynamic reporting enables ‘at a glance’ insights into cost vs benefit vs time so decisions can be made on trusted data
• Bringing PMO practices such as RAID, DMAIC and ASDEO, ideation and financial reporting into PowerSteering removes manual overhead leaving the team space to evolve and add more overall value to the organization

“We use PowerSteering as a Program Management tool: for Financial reporting, and for adherence to governance. Overall, this gives us insight for reporting our performance improvement program, which is our benefit realisation. This benefit is received through either continuous improvement or capital funding.”

The Initiatives

The early initiatives for British Sugar involved putting forth strict governance towards their processes. This included a heavy reliance on PowerSteering’s ongoing analysis tools to improve visibility and control. Being able to simplify and control stage and gate processes was crucial. Using PowerSteering they could better optimize on resources as projects went along, improving ROI and helping continuously decide which programs should progress. The interface and reporting tools allowed Project Managers to stay on top while rationalizing activities.

Growth with PowerSteering

As with most PMOs, as they mature, governance and processes are revisited. Some items are scaled back while other processes might be dialed up. For British Sugar, this transformation included viewing PowerSteering in a new, capable way—as a trusted consultant for change.British Sugar found new areas to capitalize on with the capabilities of PowerSteering. More and more business functions were able to utilize PowerSteering in one way or another, from managing resources in the internal IS team to showing step-by-step project development in procurement. Ultimately, PowerSteering became the backbone to keep everything in one place. It provided the one way to have an understanding of everything that everyone’s thinking about.

Looking Ahead

Having enabled more use cases and users than the initial expected journey British Sugar is continuing to focus on ways to innovate and get more out of their PMO. Their road to innovation has taken them from the basics of strict governance, streamlining and rationalizing and evolved to a mature new breed of PMO—The Results Delivery Office (RDO).

Download the case study