This global enterprise needed more than typical resource management software. RPM delivered.
For this multinational organization, resource management has always been critical to success. But the old way of working was falling short—until they found RPM.
With tens of thousands of employees around the world, one global corporation realized a few years back that they needed a better way to manage their resources.
Each division in this company was managing its own projects fairly efficiently (an impressive undertaking), but a few visionary leaders saw a larger issue.
Sure, they reasoned, our company is generally able to manage our resources and capacity, but we’re missing a critical piece of the puzzle: We don’t have any way to know whether our people are working on the most important projects first—the ones that matter most to leadership.
“We lacked visibility into whether our people were focused on the highest-priority initiatives — the ones with the greatest strategic importance to leadership.”
It’s a common problem.
This is a challenge most enterprise leaders know well. They set their strategic priorities in the boardroom, but that message might never make it to the people responsible for actually delivering on those priorities.
It was a problem this company was ready to solve, so they spent two years searching for a way to align their entire global organization around the right priorities.
The platform they landed on is RPM from Milestone Consulting Group. And it was built for exactly this purpose.
The scale of the challenge
When you’re managing thousands of different projects all around the world, your organization is going to be complex. There’s no way around it.
The company has technicians, specialists, and operators working across dozens of business divisions, each with its own leadership and its own priorities. People work on multiple project lists at once, and, before they implemented RPM, no single owner could see the whole picture at once.
Leaders knew what work was most important, but they couldn’t be sure the right people were working on it.
“As a very large, complex company, one of the challenges we face is trying to maximize what everyone is working on. Who’s working on what? What changes are coming? How do I best utilize my resources? What do we do when we have gaps? How do I identify those? And what are the priorities across very different functions and businesses? All of that is a challenge.”
A different question
This company already had tools that could track projects and allocate resources—they weren’t looking for more of that—they were looking for something most resource management tools aren’t built to deliver.
Most resource management platforms answer the question, Who’s working on what? This company was asking a different one: Do the projects we’ve said matter most have the resources to succeed?
It’s a question of alignment.
This company was raising a question every executive has asked at some point—and almost no tool is built to answer it.
“We’re a large company with different business segments — and there’s different priorities for each of them. We don’t have a list of 200 projects for the company. We have 100 lists that have different owners. And our people work on multiple of those lists. So how do you prioritize between businesses that don’t have the same leadership? That’s the question.”
The search was on.
To find a solution that could align their resources with leadership’s priorities, this company tapped a resource management expert within their own organization. William, a longtime champion of smarter resource management, had already been thinking about this problem for more than a decade.
He spent the next two years evaluating every option on the market.
What he found was this: There were plenty of small-scale tools that couldn’t handle the needs of this multinational corporation, and several enterprise platforms that didn’t deliver exactly what he needed. For a company this complex, neither would work.
“The other systems out there weren’t capable of doing what we needed — or they were pretty rigid,” says William.
After much evaluation, RPM stood out as different.
Why RPM?
The project experts at Milestone had designed RPM for one primary purpose: to align resources to priorities (not just to track them or allocate them). That made it the right architectural fit from the start.
On top of that, RPM was built by a team of experts that William, and others across the company, already knew and trusted. He knew that the people at Milestone would be able to come alongside him and shape RPM into exactly the tool they needed.
“What was interesting about Milestone is they had already created this very unique solution, and they had the ability to work with us to make RPM exactly what we needed,” says William. “We wanted a partner that could help us figure out the best way to work for our company.”
“In my 26 years of working with external vendors, Milestone ranks among the very best. They’re a high-performing team with deep expertise and a remarkable ability to tackle challenges and find solutions.”
How it’s going so far
With RPM in place, leaders at this company now have line of sight across their entire portfolio for the first time. They can see which projects are active, which are prioritized, and whether they have the resources to complete their most important projects first.
The data is real (and it’s updated in real-time). Leadership decisions are based on reality. And the conversations leaders are having with their teams are different—because they can finally see whether the work the company has decided matters most is the work that’s actually getting done.
“Now we have a line of sight into what projects are active and prioritized for our businesses, all the way down to seeing if we have resources or not. That’s really helpful. From there, we can help make sure our people are working on the right things.”
Was RPM the right choice?
Does William feel they made the right decision to roll out RPM across their entire worldwide organization? In short, yes. And the process of configuring and implementing RPM has been positive.
“The team I worked with at Milestone was amazing. They really stepped up and got things done,” says William. “They ebbed and flowed where we needed them to compromise, and they really worked with us. They are extremely great partners.”
