PROJECT DISCIPLINE YIELDS RESULTS AT AXA FINANCIAL

At AXA Financial these days, any significant project proposal requires a trip by the IT and business sponsors to a governance committee consisting of the company's CEO, the heads of service and distribution, the CIO and the corporate CFO. "No one walks into that room ill-prepared," says CIO Bill Levine. "And, frankly, nobody likes to walk into that room."

High-level scrutiny is just one aspect of project management (PM) discipline that AXA Financial has adopted, according to Charlie Curcio, IT CFO. The push for improved PM capability came about four years ago when AXA Financial embarked on a growth program. "We were investing huge amounts of capital to grow the company and we realized that we had to start managing so that we could get the most value for our dollar," he says.

It was at that time that AXA Financial set up a project management office staffed by professionals trained in project discipline. "We have about 900 people in our IT organization, and only 14 people in the PMO," says Wayne Dix, who was brought in to manage the PMO at its inception. "But what we have there is a cadre of highly qualified, senior project managers."

While many PMOs are process- and report-focused, according to Dix, his team, which has 10 members who are PMI-certified (Project Management Institute, Newtown Square, PA), is directly involved in managing projects. "We typically get involved in the largest projects, meaning somewhere between 10 and 20 annually," Dix says, adding that smaller projects get a "mini" version of PM treatment, including common status report and common accounting. Additionally, the PMO works in concert with Curcio's team, "reporting on the entire portfolio on a monthly basis, with greater detail for the larger investments," Dix relates. "We permeate that process and the associated discipline throughout the organization, whether people are on my team or not."

At the portfolio level, AXA Financial uses UMT's (United Management Technologies Corp., New York) StratFrames tool to prioritize projects and manage resources, according to Curcio. "By loading data around certain variables relating to company objectives and strategy, it's able to rank and rate projects mathematically, based on a weighting," he explains. "We look at our resource availability against the dollar value and number of projects and come up with a cut-off where we say, in effect, 'If we did this set of projects it would maximize our value according to our objectives.'"

Curcio demonstrates the value of improved PM discipline by a look at the 92 projects executed during 2002, showing that only one project was notably over budget. While Curcio would not mention actual figures, he says that "if you aggregate all the projects and consider what we expected to spend and what we actually spent, we were within about a six percent range," adding, "we feel pretty comfortable and confident about that."

Anthony O'Donnell has covered technology in the insurance industry since 2000, when he joined the editorial staff of Insurance & Technology. As an editor and reporter for I&T and the InformationWeek Financial Services of TechWeb he has written on all areas of information ... View Full Bio