How the European Investment Bank (EIB) improved its portfolio, program and project practices with threon

The European Investment Bank (EIB) is the only bank owned by and representing the interests of the European Union Member States. With a high level of responsibility resting on its shoulders, effective IT portfolio management is essential to its activities. After a structural reorganization, EIB’s IT Program Management Office (IT PMO) was transformed into a dedicated unit and decided to establish an “IT Program Management Information System” (PMIS) …

Challenges

Before the start of the improvement project, EIB’s IT Department was suffering from time-consuming project reporting processes, leading to inefficiency on the part of both project managers and the Program Management Office (PMO). The absence of a central repository of all project-related information and documents further complicated communication, capacity planning, demand management and reporting.

In terms of project management itself, more focus was placed on project controlling (particularly on the financial side) rather than on project and program planning and monitoring. As a result, little preventative quality assurance was carried out, leading to time wasted on investigating cost and time deviations.

EIB approved the start of the implementation of a centralized program and portfolio management system (Microsoft Project Server), which was coordinated by threon. It involved six major objectives:

• gain greater visibility into ongoing and future projects;
• centralize project data into one database for easier planning and cost consolidation;
• facilitate project and program reporting within the organization;
• promote paperless approval processes by implementing electronic workflows;
• encourage proper project planning from the beginning, to better anticipate project outcomes and potential deviations;
• increase collaboration in general.

Results

threon helped EIB accelerate its digitalization process, resulting in a higher service maturity level. A formal demand management workflow was created to centralize all new ideas and automated reporting was introduced for PMO and project managers by means of the threon Best Practice Pack for Reporting (BBP-RP). threon therefore simplified EIB’s program and portfolio management system. 

EIB’s PMIS has established itself as the reference system for all IT Projects, and this success has raised interest from other parts of the bank. The next phase included broadening the solution’s scope by adding more features for IT, but also opening it up to a larger user base from other departments, such as Human Resources, Lending Operations, Facilities Management and Procurement.