Austrian Federal Ministry of Constitutional Affairs, Reforms, Deregulation and Justice

Company info

The Federal Ministry of Constitutional Affairs, Reforms, Deregulation and Justice is a federal administrative authority. It ensures the judiciary’s independence and the proper administration of justice regarding the population’s legal interests. Furthermore, the ministry is in charge of drafting legislative acts in constitutional, civil, and criminal law on the one hand and sees to the agendas of reforms and deregulation on the other.

The Ministry’ IT department uses over thirty individually developed core IT applications, managed by its IT service provider BRZ, that is the provider of the whole Austrian federal administration.

Challenge

The IT department needed a better control of their demand management:

• They were overwhelmed by demands, that led to a decrease on the agreed delivery comments.
• The legacy tools in place were not sufficient in reinforcing best practices in demand approval.
• Unstructured communication between the Ministry and its IT service provider led to suboptimal demand selections.
• There was a lack of visibility on progress of projects – status report would show only information of previous quarters.

Solution

Clarity PPM, that was also already used by the IT provider BRZ, was implemented. All demands were now centrally captured, categorised, evaluated and prioritised. Working on the same platform, allowed the IT department and BRZ to utilise the demand and project management process jointly. Consequently, a clear definition of workflows, roles and responsibilities and on criteria on how to assess, prioritise and approve demands and projects were defined.

Result

The successfully established governance and standardisation of processes led to a dramatic cut down in approval times. Both – IT department and their service provider – profit from a better overview of their resources and capacities, helping them to better align demand and project delivery. Additionally, the time for creating status reports was reduced from several months to less than a week, thus providing timely and accurate information.

After the positive experiences and many benefits of this solution, the ministerial IT department choose to introduce also portfolio management.