SoCura: A Focused Approach to Efficient Resource Planning and Control

SoCura delivers IT, financial, and professional services to Malteser—an international aid organization providing healthcare and social services in over 120 countries. As Malteser’s majority-owned IT partner, SoCura plays a key role in its digital transformation and has extended its services to other welfare and church organizations.

SoCura's IT PMO manages over 30 projects annually with its project managers, ranging from emergency call app development and compliance consulting to large-scale infrastructure migrations and IT governance implementations.

Managing this dynamic portfolio came with several challenges during the project planning phase:

• Frequent scope changes impacting time, cost, and risk
• Phase-based planning where effort is unclear until after the initiation phase
• Projects ending upon completion of the initiation phase
• Unplanned projects triggered by legal or technical needs

These issues were compounded by a fragmented toolset—Excel for resource planning, MS Project for timelines—requiring manual data transfer and leading to:

• Poor visibility into resource availability and capacity
• Difficulty accounting for factors like vacations and part-time schedules
• Inability to plan beyond short-term needs

Data consolidation was also time-consuming and unreliable, as information had to be manually synced between tools.

A decade ago, SoCura established its PMO to professionalize project management.

Key goals included:

• Transparent, always-accessible project data
• Simplified, unified planning tools
• Forward-looking capacity planning
• Clear visibility into progress and utilization
• Retrospective learning

The PMO implemented PRINCE2 and subsequently developed an internal project management framework, but Excel-based tools limited further progress. To reach the next level, SoCura selected Planview ProjectAdvantage (formerly Sciforma) as its PPM solution after a thorough market evaluation.

ProjectAdvantage's key differentiators:

• Ready-to-use features for dynamic updates, overviews, and resource tracking
• Fast deployment (8 months to go-live)
• Lower consulting costs than competitors
• Intuitive interface and supported training

SoCura's implementation reflects their specific operational model and needs, including their specific approach to resource management of the project managers employed.

Unlike many organizations that track all resources in their PPM tool, SoCura focuses exclusively on their 13 project managers for the time being. Other resources (developers, specialists) are managed through direct communication and strategic discussion with department heads. Timesheet data for non-PM resources flows in solely for invoicing purposes.

When resource conflicts or overloads occur, monthly planning meetings use ProjectAdvantage data to:

• Review resource utilization
• Identify overbooked project managers
• Discuss project priorities and adjust allocations
• Monitor underbooked resources and assign new projects from the idea pipeline

"We only discuss resources when someone is overbooked. Otherwise, there's no meeting." Viola Esch, Project Manager

Additionally, SoCura leverages ProjectAdvantage's budgeting capabilities with two distinct tracking approaches:

• Timeline-based budgets for financial controlling and planning
• Order-based budgets to track against customer commitments

The transformation from manual processes to ProjectAdvantage has delivered tangible benefits across multiple dimensions.

Time savings through automation

The most immediate impact has been eliminating manual data consolidation. What previously required extensive copying between multiple tools now happens automatically within a single system.

Single source of truth

All projects now run entirely within ProjectAdvantage, from idea through execution, enabling confident, multidimensional analysis.

Realistic resource planning

The baseline functionality—which gives early insight into resource capacity—has been particularly valuable, serving as the foundation for capacity utilization by accounting for recurring tasks.

Strategic planning capability

Perhaps most significantly, SoCura can now plan up to a year year in advance. This forward visibility supports:

• Proactive resource allocation
• Better project portfolio planning and control
• Overview of all projects and their KPIs
• Retrospective planning review to continuously improve resource planning

With their core implementation successful, SoCura has ambitious plans for expanding ProjectAdvantage's use:

• Broader user base: Rolling out to non-PMO roles across SoCura and Malteser
• System integration: Syncing with SAP for financial data automation
• Client portal: Providing clients with real-time access to project reports and updates