The client builds and sells luxury electric vehicles in the United States for sale in the US and abroad. They released their first vehicle with various trim levels and are now planning to introduce a new model and expand beyond only car manufacturing. Over the last several years, there has been a significant increase in competition within the electric automotive space. The company relies on the efforts of a global collaborative workforce to support ambitious plans to grow market share and increase revenue. To realize this vision, the company tasks the workforce with ensuring quality and driving cost-effectiveness.

The dynamic environment in which the company operates demands fast growth and rapid response to constant changes. With a startup culture, this auto manufacturer still operates as it initially did. Leaders, managers and teams are singularly focused on their silos, leveraging solutions that have worked for them in the past.

Shifting from the startup mode to the growth phase requires the ability of managers and leadership visibility beyond the horizon to make strategic decisions with a single source of truth. Managers must become effective decision-makers and understand their business, constraints and opportunities across their portfolios. Each level depends on understanding and effectively communicating up, down and across to focus energy on outcomes.

Several underlying key challenges are contributing to the current state that the solution must address.

The leadership and managers of the company have determined that their current way of working is no longer effective. They need to find a strategic portfolio management (SPM) solution that scales with them, breaks down silos and enables everyone to focus on the mission at hand: creating the most captivating electric vehicles centered around the human experience.

The company builds electric vehicles in a digital world and relies heavily on its IT department as a core enabler for the entire enterprise. Factories, infrastructure and security revolve around information technology's ability to execute and achieve the desired outcomes. Their current way of managing this mission-critical activity is in disparate systems, ad hoc workflows and team-dependent vocabulary which does not support their end-state vision. The organization's end goal is to achieve digital representation of their work and products with proper value streams.

Our approach recommended beginning their journey at step one: Focusing on removing silos, standardizing data, aligning processes and consolidating tools. Teams needed to focus on execution and communication, not building PowerPoint decks and struggling with unknown resource constraints.

The SPM solution had to enable team members to understand the plan, be accountable and execute their actions. At the same time, this information should provide a holistic view of the portfolio so that users can make data-based decisions with accurate and timely information. Leveraging all key project management capabilities with resource capacity planning will be the first evolutionary step in their long journey.

Each phase will provide compounding value across the immediate teams and those who work closely with them.

The approach to designing and deploying the right SPM solution for the client was based on managing their long-term vision and short-term needs. The client's long-term vision encompasses managing value streams, capturing TCO and enterprise resource planning to establish a 360-degree view of all their interconnected portfolios of investments. In the short term, the management needs a clear line of sight to execute against the immediate needs.

To ensure maximum adoption without overwhelming teams, experts from HCLTech and the client used the analogy of 'floors' to describe the deployment. This continuous reference made the deployment journey more tangible for the teams, helping them align their actions with the SPM solution adoption plan. The 'floors' represent different stages of deployment, with each stage building upon the previous one, much like how a building's floors are built one on top of the other.

The first phase, step one, deployed a basic foundational SPM solution while providing the framework for the future. It creates a single source of truth that will then flow up to the portfolio level. Step one included basic investment management with resources and tasks. This allowed data to be used by portfolio managers to make true data-based decisions.

Operating in a dynamic environment, the client needs room to reorient their process and re-discover how they can work in a modern way. The HCLTech consulting team has established a series of simple, understandable steps to drive this process, providing the flexibility for them to explore. This approach meant deploying but not initially adopting all the features the SPM solution offers. As the client teams learn and adopt at their own pace, maturity will increase. For example, step one will align resources to projects but not tasks — at least, not just yet.

Switching to a new tool can be challenging in a high-pressure environment. We aligned outcomes to current tool capabilities and features to alleviate this pain while creating bounds around the 'out of the box/standard.' We accounted for some unique value-added aspects of their current business process where it made business sense. This approach reduced friction and supported fast adoption.

Portfolio managers have been able to focus and make better data-based decisions by reducing noise, eliminating late data and increasing trust in data quality. A shift from reactive to proactive is underway, enabling better investment outcomes.

A single source of truth has reduced the churn, ambiguity and preparation needed to discuss the health or status of active investments, decreasing the time from data to decision.

Better visibility of the resource alignment has facilitated prioritization discussions and decisions.

As the rollout team realizes and demonstrates the solution's benefits, additional groups have begun discussing how adopting it can support their outcomes.

Building the foundation of a strategic portfolio management (SPM) solution is a critical first step in the journey to value stream management and outcome realization. For this client, the fundamentals and quality were built from the ground up and realized on Day 1. Looking forward, their team will continually learn, adapt and accelerate the value they receive from their SPM solution.