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"Innotas has been key to our ability to deliver major projects that are expected to achieve a 5 year savings of $10M."Marcia Stanfield
Director, Strategic Initiatives

Open Technology Solutions

Organization

Open Technology Solutions (OTS) is a Credit Union Service organization (CUSO) that provides a complete set of IT services to four large credit unions that also own OTS.

Business Opportunity

Marcia Stanfield, OTS Director Strategic Initiatives, discovered that IT Governance is more than successful project delivery.

  • OTS was overwhelmed by the volume of service requests it was receiving from its user base. The organization initially looked for separate customers an IT Governance solution that would help deliver projects more efficiently, but quickly realized that getting a handle on its capacity to support project requests after routine service requests and maintenance activities were considered was a much bigger priority.
  • Additionally, as a collaboratively-owned IT service provider, OTS was challenged with prioritizing their projects across the four credit unions. OTS wanted to create a more proactive work environment.

Solution

On-demand IT Governance from Innotas

  • Among the products that met its requirements for resource and portfolio management, Open Technology Solutions chose Innotas because of its flexible licensing and pricing, and ease of implementation.
  • Marcia has been extremely impressed with the Innotas solution and service experience. "I was up and running in 2 weeks on my own, with no travel and no classes. ThatÕs incredibly impressive for a product as full featured and robust as Innotas. And the outstanding customer success management team contributed a great deal to our success."
  • In its first year of implementation, the Innotas capacity and demand capabilities showed that OTS's customers were asking for 37,000 more hours of work than the organization had capacity to deliver. This drove the organization to implement a resource tracking process against major work categories in Innotas in order to understand the use of its capacity. OTS found it was spending 85-90% of its time on maintenance and enhancements and only 10-15% on strategic projects of interest to its owners.
  • To better balance the portfolio, OTS implemented a governance process and steering committee, enabled with reports and data from Innotas, which imposed limits on time spent on maintenance and enhancements and provided additional capacity for strategic projects.

Results and Benefits

  • Bottom line savings: "We have four major conversion projects that are expected to save $10 million over the next five years. Failure to deliver these projects was not an option, and using the resource and portfolio management capabilities of Innotas, we were able to manage our capacity to ensure that we met schedule, timeline, and quality standards in every case."
  • Control: In 18 months, OTS moved from 85% to 90% time spent on maintenance & enhancements, to 60% maintenance, 30% strategic projects and 10% enhancements to projects. ÒWe had to change the culture and expectations. Innotas provides the functionality and data we need to foster a frequency, scope and accuracy of communication we did not have before."
  • Credibility: Innotas dashboards, charts and graphs created so much confidence at the 2008 OTS planning meeting that the Board said, "Enough of the data, we know you know your business. Let's talk about more strategic initiatives."