QNB Group connects strategy, continuous planning, and delivery to scale IT governance

As QNB Group expanded its transformation agenda across a distributed banking group, the volume, spread, and interdependency of IT initiatives outgrew a project management practice split across separate systems, email, Excel, and some paper-based steps. QNB Group needed one connected, group-wide view linking strategy, funding, delivery, resources, vendors, and governance.

QNB Group adopted Planview AdaptiveWork as the foundation for a phased transformation of its IT project management practice, connecting demand, delivery, governance, quality assurance, and vendor collaboration in one platform. The result: QNB Group cut its demand-planning cycle in half, moved from annual to quarterly planning, and decoupled project scoping from budget commitment, improving the accuracy of its financial planning.

Qatar National Bank (QNB Group) was established in 1964 as Qatar's first Qatari-owned commercial bank, with equal ownership split between the Qatar Investment Authority and public shareholders. QNB Group has grown to become the largest bank in Qatar and one of the most respected financial institutions in the Middle East and Africa region. Operating in 28 countries through more than 900 locations, the bank employs over 31,000 staff and has annual revenue exceeding QAR44.8 billion (USD12.3 billion).

QNB Group already had a robust project management methodology and governance in place. But as the Group's transformation agenda grew, the processes around projects became increasingly scattered. Strategy planning, budgeting, project scoping, and portfolio management ran across multiple systems, email, Excel, and in some cases paper, each handoff adding risk of duplicated work, inconsistent data, and delay.

The task of Demand Planning illustrated the challenge clearly. Once a year, Group Strategy asked every business area for its anticipated project demand by email and consolidated the responses in a single Excel file. Vukmanovic’s team then manually reviewed the inputs to assess capacity, cost, and vendor involvement, an exercise that took roughly two months and depended on extensive manual follow-up and version control.

For the bank’s leaders, the issue went beyond reporting effort. When a new request came in, decision-makers needed to know what that new work would affect and what else might be delayed if it was approved. The challenge: building an accurate picture from scattered sources could take days and was often outdated by the time executives saw it.

QNB Group was not looking for another point solution. The bank needed a robust, extensible platform that could connect the processes surrounding a project, not just the project plan itself. AdaptiveWork provided end-to-end coverage across planning and funding, scoping, delivery, time and capacity, without requiring QNB Group to stitch together multiple products.

“Most organizations already have some form of project-management tool,” Vukmanovic says. “The question is how comprehensive it is and how well it connects with the rest of the organization’s processes.”

The rollout deliberately started at the beginning of the project lifecycle, with CAPEX demand management and annual planning, because everything downstream depends on what gets funded first, and because planning builds organization-wide alignment before the more complex, resource-intensive phases arrived. The deployment of AdaptiveWork then progressed through project delivery and quality assurance, third-party vendor collaboration, and requirements gathering, with Group IT and Group Strategy champions leading the all important training and adoption support. QNB Group is now extending the same workflows to subsidiary operations.

When it comes to Demand Planning, QNB Group has been able to move from one annual cycle, taking about two months, to four quarterly cycles that take about a month each. Quarterly planning also let QNB Group decouple project scoping from the budget commitment, with cost now confirmed once scope is clearer rather than estimated up front. A knock-on benefit of this is that it has reduced the volume of ad hoc, off-cycle requests, since new work can usually wait for the next quarter rather than breaking into the annual plan.

QNB have IT and business teams in Hong Kong, Singapore, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Oman, France, and the UK. When collaboration happened outside the project tool, simply understanding a reported issue, what project it related to, its stage, and what had happened, was difficult. QNB Group has now the ability to better understand any project and get the input needed instantly.

AdaptiveWork also brought governance into the daily work itself. Structured digital sign-off replaced paper-based Project Initiation Report approvals, and portfolio prioritization, risk analysis, and document governance now run through the same system, with an integration into QNB's enterprise architecture system replacing free-text references to systems and vendors with shared, standardized data. The same discipline extended to quality assurance and vendor collaboration: test scripts and bugs are tracked centrally, and authorized third-party vendors log in directly to resolve issues under QNB's own security controls, one change Vukmanovic says reduced email volume more than anyone anticipated.

Quarterly planning gives leaders four opportunities a year to reassess priorities instead of one, with a clearer understanding of dependencies and delivery implications before funding is committed. Vukmanovic estimates this could let the business assess roughly 20 % more projects a year.

Structured digital approvals, standardized project data, automated reminders, and direct vendor access have replaced paper routing and fragmented email exchanges, producing a more complete project record and clearer visibility across QNB Group's international operations. That consistency is what Vukmanovic calls "one version of the truth": every department looking at the same data, entered once and used everywhere. It's also positioning the IT team as a more collaborative enabler to the rest of the business.

QNB Group recently introduced parallel, in-tool collaboration for detailed project scoping, replacing a sequential, department-to-department workflow. Vukmanovic expects this to further shorten scoping time and improve how the business experiences the process.

Looking ahead, QNB Group will extend AdaptiveWork across the rest of the Group in line with business and market priorities, alongside further integrations with procurement and enterprise architecture systems, more mature resource and capacity forecasting, and calibration of Agile methods. The bank is also piloting Planview AI capabilities, exploring whether its growing body of planning data can help surface overlooked inputs, dependencies, and risk patterns earlier. This platform is not only a way to manage projects but it also connects strategy, demand, procurement, enterprise architecture, security, delivery, and change management. The goal is a connected, trusted flow of information from strategic intent through to outcome.