Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, part of a series on application lifecycle management and HP ALM 11 from the HP Software Universe 2010 conference in Barcelona, Spain.

1. PPM Via SaaS from HP Helps Deloitte Australia Streamline
Top-Level Decision Making
Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, part of a series on application lifecycle
management and HP ALM 11 from the HP Software Universe 2010 conference in Barcelona,
Spain.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the
transcript. Sponsor: HP.
Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you
from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Barcelona.
We're here in the week of November 29, 2010 to explore some major enterprise
software and solutions, trends and innovations making news across HP’s
ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers. [See more on HP's new ALM
11 offerings.]
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions and I’ll be your host throughout this
series of HP sponsored Software Universe Live discussions.
Our case study today focuses on Deloitte Australia, and how their business has benefited from
leveraging the software-as-a-service (SaaS) model for project and portfolio management (PPM)
activities.
To learn more about Deloitte’s innovative use of SaaS hosting for non-core applications, please
join me in welcoming Ferne King, director within the Investment and Growth Forum at Deloitte
Australia in Melbourne. Welcome.
Ferne King: Thank you.
Gardner: Tell me, Ferne, what led up to the use of SaaS for PPM. Why did this particular model
seem to make sense?
King: The SaaS model made sense to us, because we had a strategic direction in our firm that
any non-core application’s strategic intent was to have them as SaaS.
Gardner: What is it about PPM, in particular, that made this a leading candidate for that
initiative?
King: It’s the only solution that we found in the marketplace that would help us support and
have visibility into the investments we were going to make for ourselves internally around the
growth and the maintenance of what we did internally within our own firm.

2. Gardner: Perhaps for our listeners’ benefit, you could explain a little bit about what you do there
at Deloitte in Australia and the extent to which you went with this PPM solution. How far and
wide?
King: Deloitte Australia is approximately 5,000 practitioners. In 2010, our revenue was 850
million. We provide professional services to public and private clients, and we
are now globally the largest professional services firm. We utilize PPM internally
within the firm, and that helps us to understand that portfolio and prioritization.
Deloitte UK practice and Deloitte America practice in their consulting areas use
PPM to go to the market and help manage deliver investments with their client
base.
Gardner: From a high level, what have been some of the benefits of PPM in general, but
furthermore, the SaaS deployment method?
Three benefits
King: The three benefits of PPM, primarily for us has been understanding that portfolio and
linking that to our strategy. For example, our executive will have a series of business objectives
they want to achieve in the Australian practice.
By utilizing PPM, we can understand what is going on within the firm that’s meeting those
objectives, and then, more importantly for them, with the gap, and then they can take the action
on the gap. That’s the number one priority. The number two priority is being able to
communicate to our people within the practice the particulars of change.
For example, over the next quarter, what will our practitioners in the firm see as a result of all of
these myriad of initiatives going on, whether it’s a SaaS service HR system or whether it’s a new
product and service that they can take to market. Whatever change is coming, we can better
communicate that to them within their organization.
Our third priority which the PPM product helps with discipline is our area of delivery. So, in our
project management methodology, it helps us improve our disciplines. We had a journey of 18
months of doing things manually and then we brought PPM to technology enable what we were
doing manually.
From a SaaS perspective, the benefit we’ve achieved there is that we can focus our people on the
right things. Instead of having our people focused on what hardware, what platform, what change
request, what design do we need to be happening, we can focus on what our to-be process should
be, what our design should be. Then we basically hand that over the fence to the SaaS team,
which then help execute that.
We don’t have to stand in a queue within our own IT group and look for a change window. We
can make changes every Wednesday, every Sunday, 12 months of the year, and that works for us.

3. Gardner: Great. Now you described how you’ve decided on the prioritization of moving to
SaaS as non-core. But, forgive me, PPM, the way you described it, it sounds rather mission
critical. How was it that you decided on this, even though it seems so pertinent and perhaps it
forms mortar to other types of business processes?
King: We would say it’s non-core, but high value. Just because it’s non-core, doesn’t mean that
it’s not a top priority. Our firm has approximately 2,500 applications within our Australian
practice. PPM, at our executive level, is seen as one of our top 10 applications to help our
executive, our partners, the senior groups of our firm register ideas to help our business grow and
be maintained.
So, it’s high value but it’s not part of our core practice suite. It doesn’t bring in revenue and it
doesn’t keep the lights on, but it helps us manage our business.
Gardner: Could you give me a sense of the timeline? Is this something that is relatively new,
something that you're well into, something that you're looking at through the rear-view mirror
and assessing? Where are we within your roll-out of this PPM for SaaS?
The roadmap
King: I’d answer that in the question of where are we in our roadmap of strategic enterprise
portfolio management. In that journey, we're four years in and we are two
years into technology enablement. We undertook the journey four years ago
to go down strategic portfolio management and we lasted about 18 months to
2 years, manually developing and understanding our methodology,
understanding the value where we wanted to go to.
In our second year we technology enabled that to help us execute more
effectively, speed to value, time to value, and now we are entering our third year into the
maturity model of that.
Gardner: When you describe this as something that doesn’t directly impact your bottom-line, it
certainly sounds as if it’s impacting the users within your organization. What’s been the feedback
from the front lines, those who are involved with are actually using this? Has this been
something that they’ve embraced or something they needed to learn to embrace over time?
King: Fantastic results, particularly at the executive levels who are the ones who pay for us to
create the time to work on this. Deloitte itself has taken the transformation over the years, If
anybody in the market follows the professional services, industry group areas, Deloitte globally
is 160,000 practitioners and over 250 billion of revenue on FY10. We're coming together and
have been taking a journey for some time to be as one.
So, if you're a client in the marketplace, you don’t have to think about what door you need to
enter the Deloitte world. You enter one door and you get service from whatever service group
you need.

4. If I take the example of three years ago, our tax group would only be interested in what’s
happening in their tax group. Our consultant group would really only be interested in what’s
happening in the consultant group.
Now that we are acting as one, the tax service line lead and the consulting service line lead
would like visibility of what’s happening firm wide. PPM is now enabling us to do that.
What I would summarize there is that PPM has enabled us to help the executive achieve their
vision of firm-wide visibility of the enterprise investments we are making to improve our growth
and support our maintenance.
Gardner: Tell me if you could, Ferne, a little bit about how you came to the HP solution. What
was it that you were looking for in a solution and what requirements did you feel were most
important in leading up to that choice?
King: First of all, probably, 27 years experience with project delivery, coming from an
engineering construction background, getting very detailed knowledge over the years about the
one-on-one delivery components and dealing with a lot of vendors over the years in the client
marketplace.
So, well-versed in what we needed and well-versed in what was available out there in the
marketplace. When we went to market looking for a partner and a vendor solution, we were very
clear on what we wanted. HP was are able to meet that.
I actually took my own role out of the scoring process. We helped put scripts together, scenarios
for our vendors to come and demonstrate to us how we were going to achieve meeting our
objectives. Then, we brought people around the table from that business with a scoring method,
and HP won on that scoring method.
Gardner: With you being fully into this project and for those listening who might be considering
moving to a more holistic PPM approach and perhaps evaluating the different sourcing options,
is there anything in hindsight that you could offer in terms of advice when beginning such a
project?
King: Understand the method or the approach that you want to use PPM for. You cannot bring
PPM and expect it to answer 80 percent of your issues. It can support and help direct resolution
of issues, but you need to understand how you are expecting to do that. An example would be if
you want to capture ideas from other business units or groups or the technology department on
what they'd like to do to improve their application or improve product development, any area of
the business, understand the life-cycle of how you want that to be managed. Don’t expect PPM
to have preset examples for you.
Gardner: Very good. We’ve been discussing how Deloitte Australia has benefited from
leveraging SaaS as a model for delivery of project and portfolio management activities. I’d like

5. to thank our guest. We’ve been discussing this with Ferne King, Director within the Investment
and Growth Forum at Deloitte Australia. Thanks so much.
King: Thank you, Dana.
Gardner: And I’d also like to thank our listeners in joining us with this BriefingsDirect podcast,
coming to you live from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Barcelona. Look for
other podcasts from this HP event on the hp.com website as well as via the BriefingsDirect
network.
I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of Software
Universe Live discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the
transcript. Sponsor: HP.
Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast, part of a series on application lifecycle
management and HP ALM 11 from the HP Software Universe 2010 conference in Barcelona,
Spain. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.
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