Occam is a market leader in direct marketing management software and services, committed to developing and delivering the industry’s most sophisticated innovations.
With growth came a need for better clarity of resources to improve efficiency and effectiveness across a wide range of projects for clients, including Eurostar, Royal Bank of Scotland, the Ministry of Defence, Kia Motors UK, Fiat, Oxfam and the British Heart Foundation.
Having achieved ISO 9001 quality management standard and more recently the international best practice standard for information security management, ISO27001, Occam wanted better and more rigorous processes in the way it worked. In particular, it sought a single source of information on project data to enable accurate resource and project task management across all its current and planned work, while also supporting the development of project management best practice.
The Microsoft PPM solution seemed the answer as it would support the development and management of Occam’s solutions, allow the company to manage risk more effectively and give a real time view of how projects measure up commercially and contractually. The company chose a solution built on Project Server Framework, a pre-configured implementation of Microsoft’s Office Project Server product set developed by Enterprise Project Management specialists Program Framework. This was then personalised to meet Occam’s requirements enabling Occam to deploy the solution more rapidly and at a lower cost.
The PPM system went ‘live’ with little cultural resistance from those using it. Project teams especially like the flexibility of being able to access all project information easily together with the approach to information sharing that allows users to tailor a particular project site to how they want it to work.
Julie Goodwin, Occam’s Governance Officer, says this is making a tangible difference to Occam’s business. “It helped us make sense of what we do and how we do it. Resource managers can see work commitments into the future and it also presents management information that was not otherwise readily available. It will impact to our bottom line because we can now see where we are expending effort and ensure we have the right level of commercial cover.”
"The team from Program Framework was very easy to get along with. They were very proactive and genuinely interested in what we were trying to achieve. They had a very structured approach to implementing our PPM solution, leading us through what to do and how to do it. At the end of the process, we were almost self sufficient but there is still a port open if we have questions or problems.”
“The Project Server Framework solution suited us and we now better understand where we want to go further with our thinking.”
Julie Goodwin, Governance Officer, Occam
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