475 million reasons to have full control of your project
Sixty-eight billion dollar. 68,000,000,000. So large is the total amount of the payments that Försäkringskassan (The Swedish Social Insurance Agency) processes in the public authority’s system in the course of a normal year.
– It’s almost 15 % of Sweden’s GNP in 2011, says Göran Olsson, chief controller for Försäkringskassan IT, not without a little pride in his voice.
The operation of course puts enormous demands on reliability as well as development. Among other things, further substantial resources will be invested in enlarging self-service and automation of the different benefit services, such as daily sickness benefits, temporary care of a child, and others.
– The goal is to be a 24/7 public authority and at the same time reduce costs for Försäkringskassan. There are 870 employees and 200 consultants who work with this. If we simply calculate the projects that turn over one million, we are quickly up in 100 projects at every given point of time. It becomes a little to keep track of…
Since the beginning of 2001 Försäkringskassan IT has used the project control system Copernicus Pro, and primarily the time reporting function. For project planning, resource planning and resource booking, portfolio management, etc. they have previously used many different systems, everything from Microsoft Project to Excel.
– It was of course very heavy administratively and in addition it went very slowly. It was a real ‘mishmash solution’, explains Göran Olsson. We wanted to do something about it.
For that reason a project was started in 2010 with the purpose of implementing a new tool, and at the same time getting the organization to coordinate all of its project control to one single system.
– The implementation went slowly but surely forwards. We put a lot of energy into training and communication to get everyone on board, says Göran Olsson. The further the project advanced, the easier it became, and we have received enormously good help and support from Exicom.
Försäkringskassan IT has utilized Copernicus Pro’s scalability, and has gradually implemented more and more of the system’s functions. Today time reporting, resource planning, capacity calculation, and handling of consultants are used among others, and shortly even support for team planning.
– Today I see that being a project manager has a considerably better status. They are less stressed and more driven than previously, feels Göran Olsson. We see that man hours end up in the right place, and we work a great deal more uniformly.
Above all, reporting and follow-up have been improved, and now Försäkringskassan IT has substantially faster and more secure control of the projects’ advances.
– We have quickly succeeded in shortening the projects’ ’time-to-market’, and since everything is still rather new, we expect several good results during 2013 and 2014, says Göran Olsson confidently.