Citrix Establishes a Single Source of Truth for NPI Project Information in Workfront

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1 CASE STUDY Citrix Establishes a Single Source of Truth for NPI Project Information in Workfront building Citrix Systems factory2 Information Technology network map2 Ft. Lauderdale, FL At a Glance Challenges Complex project tracking Weekly, manual, and static updates Time-consuming reporting Benefits Estimated 35% reduction in director s and a single source of truth 50% reduction in time spent during compliance meetings Improved collaboration with 40 task owners across multiple organizations and teams New Product Introduction group expands Citrix internal deployment of the Workfront Enterprise Work Management solution, reducing s and time spent in meetings while improving collaboration across more organizations and teams. Overview Continuous improvement is the goal of every supply chain management (SCM) organization. The New Product Introduction (NPI) group at Citrix Systems is no exception. NPI, as part of the Citrix SCM organization, sought to replace its complex, manual updating and reporting processes for hardware release projects with a work management solution that delivers real-time anytime, anywhere, any device updates and reports. With program templates, work queues, and reports now centralized in the Workfront Enterprise Work Management, NPI is already seeing improvement. 1

2 Citrix is a global technology company, providing a complete and integrated portfolio of Workspaceas-a-Service, application delivery, virtualization, mobility, network delivery, and file sharing solutions that enables IT to ensure critical systems are securely available to users via the cloud or on-premises and across any device or platform. With annual revenue in 2015 of $3.28 billion, Citrix solutions are in use by more than 400,000 organizations and over 100 million users globally. The Challenge The NPI group is responsible for the design and development of Citrix hardware platforms. NPI manages its own portfolio and compliance processes, but engages cross-functionally with other departments across disciplines, including the Citrix software and platform engineering teams, to ensure the delivery of many major projects annually. Each time a new project request came into the organization, NPI program managers created a project plan of record (POR). The POR was then exported to Microsoft Excel and distributed to multiple NPI team members, as well as crossfunctional colleagues and external suppliers, so task owners could see the activities they were responsible for accomplishing to get the product into market. The exported spreadsheet lacked advanced collaborative capabilities, so there was no shared access. Updates required regular meetings and follow up s. Every week, NPI team members would gather with task owners to get status updates and a project manager would update the POR, then distribute a new spreadsheet with the expectation that task owners would again proactively review it and adjust their work accordingly. This timeconsuming, manual process would occur week after week until a project was completed which could be up to 50 weeks during a 14-month project. NPI s single source of truth is in Workfront. We needed a solution to deliver fact-based, data-driven information in real time and that s what Workfront does. Perry Hovanic, Director, New Product Introduction Group, Citrix Systems Our complex process had three main challenges: static updates, manual updates, and difficult status reporting, explains Perry Hovanic, NPI director at Citrix Systems. What we had was fact-based data manually generated and managed. What we wanted was a single repository for real-time data tracking and an automated way to clearly show project status in relation to major milestones, delinquent tasks, and analytics to performance. Seeking a solution to its workflow challenges, NPI realized the cloud-based Workfront solution would be easy to implement because it required minimal IT support and the solution was already available internally at citrix.okta.com to more than 450 users in more than a dozen other Citrix business groups. Workfront s API capability was also interesting to the NPI team because it could automate the exchange of information between the work management solution and BIRST, Citrix s preferred analytics tool. In addition to the real-time, collaborative project management capabilities that we would gain, ease of use, training, and engagement were other key benefits that Workfront had over tools that we evaluated, says Hovanic. network workfront.com telephon telephon +44 [0]

3 Templates The program manager or an authorized supplier can use the templates NPI has customized and stored in Workfront to enter project details. Workfront templates streamline repetitive tasks by automating and mapping every necessary step in the workflow. The group relies on several different development and compliance templates to kick-start projects. The Workfront Solution NPI deployed Workfront in August of 2016 to support its workflows from concept phase through design, sourcing, prototyping, compliance, and testing, as needed. Now once NPI receives completed product request and engineering documents, the technical program manager logs into Workfront to create, assign, and schedule all of the tasks to be completed for that project. With the information in Workfront, team members now only meet to review the actions, ensure dependencies and durations are aligned, and to address any issues, recording in Workfront those that have an impact on meeting the deliverables. The single solution allows them to manage the project s go-to-market tasks and revise project completion dates as development progresses. In addition, NPI is responsible for managing the hardware design and reliability portions of each product, including what will be built and what will be supplied for testing before rolling the product into mass production. With Workfront, we ve gotten much better at managing existing tasks and identifying tasks that weren t being tracked in our previous process, says Alex Datul, senior sustaining engineer in the worldwide regulatory and compliance office at Citrix Systems. Citrix hardware ships worldwide which requires the company s products to meet stringent U.S. and international safety regulations. NPI and its authorized suppliers use Workfront to track all of the tasks related to compliance requirements from the U.S. Federal Trade Commission and more than 20 foreign countries. Centralized Projects, Tasks, and Processes Having all NPI projects and tasks centralized and standardized in Workfront provides everyone on the immediate team, and anyone across the organization associated with a project or task, with complete project visibility. Because work lives in the cloud, anytime, anywhere access to the latest data and project status is always available even on a mobile device and workflows are easily managed. Project owners can add tasks to any project or create new projects with ease. As an example, during a recent quarterly business review (QBR) ad-hoc action items and proposed initiatives were quickly captured during the meeting and assignments made. These tasks would serve as the meeting minutes and establish the foundation for future collaboration and execution. It s an easy process for consolidating ad-hoc tasks and activities into a single repository for managing and follow up, says Hovanic. network workfront.com telephon telephon +44 [0]

4 My Work Pages, Issue Tracking, and Dashboards Workfront provides a simplified home page for each user. Through My Work pages, Citrix users can see items they have been tasked to do and agreed to work on as soon as they log in. Because My Work pages only include prioritized projects that NPI has approved, individuals can better plan their daily and weekly work schedules. When we started to educate users, we realized Workfront is really enabling a paradigm shift in the way people work, Hovanic says. If a task isn t on a user s plate in Workfront, it s not a priority. That individual shouldn t be working on it. If a user disagrees and thinks something is a priority, then we need to look at why it s not in Workfront, and what we, as a team, need to do to get it in there, so that we can easily collaborate on it. Workfront serves as both a central repository for information and a workflow management solution. Every day, Citrix users collaborate on social-media style discussion walls within Workfront. They also use the solution s issue tracking capabilities and dashboards to check what has been done and what still needs to be completed. Within a dashboard, users can drill down into an issue by project or by person to instantly understand the status of an issue. Issue tracking in Workfront is great because users can get immediate access to very detailed information in real time, says Brad Leppi, NPI technical program manager at Citrix Systems. When people can quickly answer questions, good decisions can be made faster. Reporting Workfront reports provide Citrix with greater visibility into what is happening with users and work. Instead of manually generating a weekly report which took approximately one to two hours a week to assemble, package, and distribute NPI team members can now automatically generate a Workfront report in seconds. Easy to set up and share, customized reports ensure everyone has access to the most upto-date information at the same time. Benefits In just a few months, NPI has achieved the following benefits from the Workfront solution: Estimated 35% reduction in director s and a single source of truth In the past, Citrix users would exchange thousands of s in an attempt to manage and resolve more than 300 issues. Using Workfront, NPI more easily assigns and tracks an average of 400 tasks on major launches annually. NPI team members and contributors now collaborate and communicate efficiently in Workfront. I have seen about a 35% reduction in my activity and the on-going collaboration in Workfront provides a single source of truth for everyone, says Hovanic. 50% reduction of time spent in compliance meetings To ensure regulatory compliance-related tasks remained on track, the team lead used to host a two-hour meeting with five NPI colleagues to review the status and highlight issues. Today, that same team leader and staff are able to cover all of the important issues in half the time. According to Datul, We now use the compliance dashboard to focus our discussion because Workfront helps us immediately identify the most pressing issues. network workfront.com telephon telephon +44 [0]

5 Improved collaboration with 40 task owners across multiple organizations and teams Instant status updates and faster workflows enhance cross-team collaboration and help drive more timely closure of tasks and issues. Without IT involvement, we were able to deploy a solution that provides real-time updates and we expect that will help us get more work done, Hovanic says. Citrix is a company of approximately 9,000 employees, more than 200 of whom are responsible for SCM projects. In the future, I d like to see us transition our whole organization away from anecdotal information and PowerPoint slides to a more efficient way of collaborating, like what we can do in Workfront, concludes Hovanic. Devour Your Teamʼs Work Chaos With Workfront Meet the King of Work Management. With real-time work planning, tracking, collaboration, and reporting, Workfront enables enterprise teams to: Drive greater productivity by automating repetitive manual tasks Increase communication and transparency through social-style updates and dashboards Reduce project failure with real-time views into project progress and resource workloads Provide data-driven insights for constant improvement network workfront.com telephon telephon +44 [0]