Worldwide Hospitality Corporation
Program & project management for data & analytics
Our client was looking to NorthStar to provide a number of services; one of which was to provide program and project management for strategic projects within the PMO. As data & analytics was a new department with in-flight strategic projects, NorthStar was required to balance the development and delivery of active projects with the establishment of functional organizational and engagement models.
Assessment & prioritization
NorthStar assessed in-progress projects and then prioritized building frameworks and processes to match that work so that anything new was immediately relevant and actionable. Any document or process created and implemented by NorthStar was usable and related to an in-flight project. For example, NorthStar noticed the Data Science team had in-flight projects but was not integrated into the strategic projects effort. A NorthStar senior project manager worked with the Data Science VP to plan for the adoption of the project management’s organizational and engagement models.
Roadmaps & timelines
After a thorough analysis, NorthStar created a functional Data Science roadmap built out 24 months by month and quarter with resource assignments and gaps identified, as well as organized the team’s existing work portfolio of forecasts and models and created program governance and engagement processes. Data science projects were not delayed during this time, and subsequently, the team was able to function more efficiently. To further integrate data science into data & analytics, NorthStar created and defined an AI Council which helped data scientists better understand business questions and gave business teams a greater appreciation of what Data Science could do. The AI Council provided a means for the hospitality company to turn data insights into actionable results.
Meeting success criteria
The success of the AI Council came out of the intersection of program management and data science. Through our client’s data & analytics PMO, NorthStar delivered 10+ strategic projects covering many functional areas – sales, marketing, Cloud, IT, DevOps, HR. Additionally, the data science team delivered 6 projects in 1Q2020. NorthStar focused on how the program and project management strategy could provide a benefit to the teams rather than being simply a reporting and statusing team. Another benefit was more alignment within departments in the Data & Analytics team and the larger organization.
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