Reliance Industries : IT Project Management System

Tuesday, June 03, 2008

Reliance Industries Limited is amongst the fortune 500 companies and the largest business house in India. For two consecutive years, Reliance has been amongst the top 25 fastest growing companies in the world. Reliance currently has more than 40,000 employees spread across various businesses and at various locations. Having such a large workforce and keeping pace with the growth is no piece of cake. One of the strategies instrumental in the growth has been the harnessing of the knowledge amongst the workforce and sharing the same across the group.

Some of the projects by Reliance which show their project management abilities to the world are the famous mega projects like the Jamnagar Refinery, Reliance Infocomm, etc. The scale of the project has always been the focal point for the company. It is always a prime consideration for all of their projects, but was never run on a project management basis.

Duplicity and a lack of systematic tracking resulted in a lot of redundant applications and issues of quality. Project delays, understaffing and low employee morale are the undesired outcomes. With RIL taking large strides in business with Exploration, Retail, SEZ and several other allied businesses coming in existence, it became even more important to manage all projects in a systematic manner with real time information on progress available at any given time.

IT teams started with labor intensive manual processes and Excel sheet based practices initially. However, with the projects increasing, this became very difficult and tracking the progress of projects and associated issues itself became an issue for the company. A hunt for a tool to facilitate this effort ended with the IT team developing an IT Project Management System (ITPMS). The need to develop an in-house tool was heightened by the fact that readymade tools either did not fit the RIL way of Project management or were extremely difficult to implement, or had a low cost to benefit ratio.

Ashish is a well-known figure of the IT industry and has been the recipient of several industry awards. He was one of the founding members of the National Stock Exchange, and also worked as the CIO of Reliance Infocomm. Ashish Chauhan, President and CIO Q What were the challenges that you faced before deploying the project? The project is at the core of IT Service Delivery within Reliance. From a site based IT organisation, the company had to convert into a coherent and coordinated IT organisation. In that sense, IT PMS has acted as a cause of this integration as well as an effect. Today, the organisation works as a well oiled coherent organisation with consistent framework, budgets, annual operating plans, policies, and consolidated common applications across sites is largely due to the hardwork put by each team member within the IT team as well as the guidance and encouragement of top leadership at each location as well as at the corporate level. A lot of efforts were put by each IT leader within the organisation to motivate their teams to come on to this evolving platform over a period of time. Q What benefits did you derive after the implementation? At each level within the organisation, IT PMS ensures complete transparency in terms of resource allocation, project schedules, SLAs for operating activities, each individual's and team's KRA vis-a-vis performance, change management, cost of each action and activity and user satisfaction with IT services in a granular manner within Reliance. It has made the organisation more agile, confident and has reduced duplication of efforts in an organisation that is spread over several locations in India and abroad. It has also helped improve consistency of IT service delivery across all locations. Q What according to you is the USP of the project? The simplicity of IT PMS combined with the comprehensiveness it provides, is in my mind the USP of this application. It spans several activities including each individual's contribution to the overall organisation objectives, from development tracking to operations SLAs, from bringing complete transparency from an IT employee's perspctive and to the business users to giving a seamless perspective of costs; making it a compelling tool for use in any large multi location set up, be it in IT or even otherwise. It has been adopted by a few research oriented organisations within Reliance for tracking their activities.

This project had been originally deployed for IT team of Reliance Group comprising of more than 2500 employees to achieve better results and have transparency with the business teams.

However, several other non IT teams have started using the same system for their project tracking activities. Key amongst them are Reliance Retail, Oil Exploration project team and Reliance Life Sciences.

The project has already given the return within one year. Savings in terms of tangible benefits due to consolidation and use of available knowledge has resulted in savings of thousands of man days and operating efficiency at par with industry best. Immense benefits in terms of improvement in the organizational culture and employee participation is of paramount importance. Access to various portals through a single sign on have already resulted in a decrease in the number of calls received by the help-desk team by upto 50%. The project was one of the central application services during the ISO certification audit and was instrumental in getting us the certification. In the last one year the system handled more than 3000 projects and currently around 1300 projects are live.

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