Sensei serves up new PPM for NSW Dept of Customer Service

Microsoft partner Sensei has brought in a new portfolio and project management (PPM) system for the NSW Department of Customer Service (DCS).

The new system, called Atlus, is built on the Microsoft Power Platform and is a product of Sensei’s, which claims it can help organisations track portfolios of work and align them to business strategies while also balancing resource utilisation, optimising work processes, fostering collaboration and helping with decision making.

The initial project spanned three months of development sprints, which ended with its launch at the start of July 2022.

The need for a new system came following the establishment of the Department in 2019, when it assumed most of the functions of the previous government’s Department of Finance, Services and Innovation, as well as inherited functions from other NSW government agencies.

During that time, it was using a number of separate systems to manage projects, such as Broadcom’s Clarity and Planview’s Clarizen platforms, in addition to spreadsheets and other manual processes.

Due to the broad range of services across the Department, the different agencies had their own ways of operating, according to Nathan Frick, PPM Altus product owner at DCS.

“For instance, Service NSW, which is essentially the front door for citizens and businesses to interact with government digitally or in person, has a very speed-to-market focus,” he said. “In all of its projects, the importance is on getting them up and out and going very quickly.

“Whereas if you compare something that’s being delivered in Digital NSW, that’s more about defining policies and standards as to how things should be done across government consistently and meeting that right standard, so they might have a different working pace.

“Those different ways of working and slightly different cultures have resulted in some traditional [project management] silos across the cluster.”

Paul Oppong, Sensei senior project manager, PPM consultant and project lead for the implementation said the PPM firm worked closely with the Department to determine the best solution to meet their needs, which ended up being its Atlus platform.

“DCS presented a high innovation appetite, and together we aligned on what success looked like, prioritised the big rocks and forged a fun-to-work-with team working shoulder to shoulder, to deliver key business outcomes,” he said.

“As Altus is built on the Microsoft Power Platform, DCS were in a strong position to leverage their investment in Microsoft technology to create a robust project management solution across the department.

“Further integrations with other line of business systems, like SAP, enhanced their access to data providing reliable and visible information for all teams and, importantly, to leadership.”

According to Frick, the internal uptake of the platform has been rapid as it has similarities to Power BI, which was in use at the Department before.

 “A lot of people were already using Power BI for their data analysis and visualisation functions, so being able to easily take a Power BI report and, for instance, publish it outside of Altus on SharePoint, is great,” he said.

“That’s functionality that we didn’t have previously. It’s also great to have all [the] information in one place so we can start to slice and dice it more reliably using a powerful tool like Power BI.”

With Atlus in place, Sensei claims the Department has seen a major uplift in project management capability and increased visibility, with usability and satisfaction with the new process and tool being high. Other benefits include improvements in project prioritisation, impact analysis and forecasting abilities.

Since the initial implementation, Sensei said in a statement that there has been a significant amount of work taking place on the overall project, which includes the integration of the Department’s SAP system and a proof of concept to use AI to automatically populate business cases.