Achieving visibility and transparency across a global organization

Why dream about the marvels of the future, when they're being built today? VINCI Energies is a global company with over 65,400 employees worldwide. Generating green energy, building smart cities and maintaining the global infrastructure are just a few of the business sectors that VINCI Energies applies itself to.

VINCI Energies encourages a culture of collaboration and has a decentralized structure of autonomous business units that work together to deliver value to the world. This bottom-up approach to work allows for maximum innovation in a field that's usually dominated by the constraints of top-down management.

While Targetprocess is used in various business units of VINCI Energies, Actemium is the VINCI Energies brand with the highest number of Targetprocess users. They excel at helping clients to improve their industrial process with smarter software and industrial automation. Their work demands that clients be 'in the loop' for projects, so Actemium uses Targetprocess to share real-time information and project data with customers.

Like VINCI Energies, Actemium has a very wide demographic of customers. Generally, they provide their services to companies working on industrial, engineering and automation projects. Their solutions have helped customers in many different segments such as Automotive, Aerospace, Life Science, Chemical, Food among others to develop and improve their manufacturing capabilities.

Because VINCI Energies is such a large group of companies with many different brands and business units, Targetprocess is not used by everyone. However, adoption of the tool is growing. The decision to make the switch tends to be made by individuals that are accountable for project outcomes. This is because Targetprocess allows for real-time transparency into a project and helps to spread responsibility out among team members.

Business Units that do not adopt Targetprocess can use whatever management solution they are comfortable with; nevertheless the ones moving to Targetprocess have enabled team members from various business units to get a visual and unified picture of projects, and to see and act upon deviations from estimates in real-time. This enhanced cross-team collaboration and allows decision-makers to act based on facts, rather than how they think the project is going.

Actemium does not always use Targetprocess in a characteristically agile way. There are no releases or iterations because Actemium's work usually consists of industrial projects with clear start and end dates. Targetprocess is usually used as an agile tool, but its flexibility allows Actemium to customize the tool to their process. Teams can range anywhere from 2-3 to 200 colleagues.

Time constraints are an important factor for Actemium's projects, so it's vital for them to be able to able to identify and measure any deviations from a project's original plan. To achieve this, they continuously compare actual spent and remain time against planned effort to identify deviations as soon as possible in order to set up corrective actions immediately. Targetprocess's Testing Module is used to aid with the commissioning and testing of industrial installations. They also use Targetprocess to track and manage requests from customers.

Using an open-ended project management tool allows VINCI Energies to generate additional consulting business. Customers that are impressed with the tool or with VINCI Energies' processes often ask VINCI Energies to help them set up their own projects with Targetprocess.

The opportunities that Targetprocess has unlocked for VINCI Energies are difficult to quantify with specific metrics, but Jorge Rivero, Innovation Director at VINCI Energies, estimates that teams who adopt Targetprocess generally see a 5% productivity boost for large-scale projects (15-35K work hours). Time saved for smaller projects is more difficult to quantify, but they definitely profit too. In addition to this overall efficiency increase, he sees four main areas where Targetprocess has proven itself to be invaluable:

Targetprocess provides real-time transparency to VINCI Energies colleagues, allowing them to react quickly to problems. Comments on work items have replaced the countless emails that used to come with collaborating on a project. Team members can check work estimations against real work, allowing them to quickly spot and fix deviations. Now everyone gives estimates, rather than only project managers.

Many of the projects in VINCI Energies' portfolio require collaboration between two or more business units. Transparency is especially important for these projects because responsibility is shared. Individuals from different teams have to come together and function as a cohesive unit without letting emotions get in the way of facts.

Jorge hopes to standardize the process for these projects, and has been demonstrating Targetprocess at some of VINCI Energies' internal events. As more business units adopt the tool, collaboration has been getting easier.

"Before Targetprocess, coordination was about getting everyone together in a room. This consumed time. Now that everything is transparent, we don't need to meet as often and we waste less time. We've been able to move from a traditional management structure to a more democratic and collaborative culture."

Adoption of a new tool isn't just about software — it's about your methodology. This is why Targetprocess works so well for VINCI Energies; their use of our tool isn't typical, but their culture of innovation and collaboration match with Targetprocess's core values perfectly.

Using a tool that doesn't match your process is useless, and using a good tool on top of a bad process will only accelerate poor results. Jorge believes that this is part of what makes Targetprocess so effective for VINCI Energies' business units. It offers a good basis when you first start out and is customizable to fit your organization's needs along the way.