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Innotas Customer Success Stories

 

Organization: First Financial Bankshares, Inc.

Catherine Starks, Operations Officer/Project Office Manager, First Technology Bankshares, Inc."Senior Management told us we brought project management to a totally different level."Catherine Starks
Operations Officer/
Project Office Manager

First Financial Bankshares, Inc. is a financial holding company headquartered in Abilene, Texas, with consolidated assets of $3.1 billion. First Financial operates 10 affiliate banks, which provide services from 48 full-service locations in the Central, West and High Plains regions of Texas. The Company also operates a trust company and a technology services company. First Financial Bankshares, Inc. is listed on The NASDAQ Global Select Market under the symbol FFIN, with 10 community banks in 48 locations. First Technology Services, Inc. is the IT company that supports the holding company.

Business Opportunity

First Technology Services wanted a flexible affordable tool to help build a Project Management Office (PMO) from the ground up.

  • First Technology Services was managing multiple project status reports with Excel spreadsheets from several different project managers which were cumbersome and time consuming.
  • Additionally, they required a central project management repository where senior management could better manage, measure, track, trace, and prioritize all of the work that was being requested from First Financial Bankshares subsidiaries and completed by First Technology Services.

Solution

On-demand IT Governance Project Portfolio from Innotas
After evaluating several vendors, including CA Clarity and Microsoft, Catherine Starks, leader of the selection committee, decided on Innotas for several reasons:

  • Ease of use and lack of complexity.
  • On-demand model was perfect for management to access the system anytime, anywhere or any place.
  • Innotas' ability to rationalize and catalogue all strategic and sustaining work within the Innotas PPM solution, which would be the beginnings of an IT Governance methodology. Innotas' application portfolio module and the project portfolio capability enabled more visibility into the work and helped facilitate improved organization around workload and project management ownership.

Results & Benefits

  • Starting a PMO: Today, Starks manages the PMO for First Technology Services and has begun the process of building the PMO from the ground up.
  • "Project Labs" initiative: The labs are meetings held once a week with Starks and the project managers to review the real-time Innotas reports and executive dashboards and to set priorities for applications, projects and tasks. The nature of Innotas' on-demand offering allows for these meetings to be virtual, and updates and modifications during the labs can be made in real time using Innotas over a web browser.
  • More productivity and better communication: According to Starks, productivity and communication have been significantly enhanced with these collaborative "Project Labs" resulting in more efficient management of the reporting process and faster delivery time to the business. Additionally, the approval process is becoming more streamlined by using the Innotas service request module which will become a conduit for setting work priorities and implementing best practices for IT Governance.
  • Increased visibility: Executive dashboards give management visibility into projects that are in flight and to allow for a better understanding of project health and costs associated with the high priority work IT is charted to complete.
  • Solid foundation for project forecast and delivery: Overall, the use of Innotas has enabled a framework for First Technology Services to create a more structured environment using a combination of software, best practices, and collaboration among the IT leadership to forecast demand and deliver projects on time.