IIROC

The Investment Industry Regulatory Organization of Canada (IIROC) is the pan-Canadian self-regulatory organization that oversees all investment dealers and their trading activity in Canada’s debt and equity markets. IIROC sets high quality regulatory and investment industry standards, protects investors, and strengthens market integrity while supporting healthy Canadian capital markets. IIROC carries out its regulatory responsibilities through setting and enforcing rules regarding the proficiency, business, and financial conduct of more than 170 Canadian investment dealer firms and their more than 29,000 registered employees.

Canadians’ attitudes towards investing, saving and the management of their financial lives are being fundamentally altered. A changing demographic and an evolving society, new entrants in financial services, the availability of new digital tools and technologies and the convergence of once discrete financial products into a comprehensive package of financial life management services are all having an impact. As a result, Canadians are changing the way they want to consume advice and services and how they interact with the firms that provide them. As Canada’s financial services industry evolves in response to these changes, IIROC needed to evolve with it and embarked on an ambitious transformation and change agenda with significant investments in new tools and technology. Key to this transformation was establishing an Enterprise Portfolio Management Office (ePMO) to drive successful execution and delivery of IIROC projects and optimization of IIROC’s overall project investment portfolio. Previously, IIROC’s projects were being managed in silos with limited line of sight to portfolio health and overall resource capacity and utilization. Project management practices were manual and time consuming with multiple sources of data making it difficult to get a consolidated view to the overall health of the Portfolio.

In response to the above, IIROC began the search for a ‘best in class’ PPM (Project Portfolio Management) solution and selected Planview AdaptiveWork. By leveraging AdaptiveWork, IIROC was able to gain efficiencies related to the delivery of projects and optimize its resources to increase overall project success rates and enterprise value.

Efficiency

• Leveraged AdaptiveWork Views to create a “one-stop” repository for PMs to easily track their project schedule, issues, risks, actions, decisions, lessons learned and PCRs (project change requests)
• Utilized AdaptiveWork Custom Object to create a fully integrated electronic meeting minutes solution
• Implemented AdaptiveWork Timesheets and Task Management to track project progress, enable project team members to easily keep track of project deliverables and ensure appropriate costing of project labour (i.e. CAPEX/OPEX)
• Automated project status reporting leveraging AdaptiveWork slide publisher
• Enabled Real-Time Portfolio Visibility

Transparency

• Activated Dashboard reporting in AdaptiveWork for Senior Management to stay informed on Portfolio Health
• Created real-time visibility to Portfolio issues and risks
• Enabled multiple reports for different stakeholders and audits
• Optimized Project Resources

Productivity

• Leveraged AdaptiveWork’s Capacity Planning solution to optimize resource deployment and increase overall project delivery value
• Simplified management of resources for Resource Managers (easy user interface for Managers)
• Enabled improved visibility to project priorities by resource

Other Benefits

• Eliminated paper approval processes for core deliverables such as Project Change Request (PCRs) leveraging AdaptiveWork forms and workflow
• Ability to update AdaptiveWork data with data from other systems within seconds using AdaptiveWork import capabilities
• Streamlined preparation efforts for internal and external audits

“Industry reports have shown as high as 70-80% of projects take longer to implement and cost more than initially budgeted. We’ve set an internal target to not exceed 10%. With AdaptiveWork now fully integrated into our model, we are well on our way to achieving this key benchmark which will ultimately translate into cost savings.” – Aaron Nicholl, Director ePMO