How Schroders’ PMO Partners with Planview Managed Services to Manage Change at Scale

Schroders is a global investment manager with approximately £817 billion of assets under management (AUM), offering a broad range of investment products. Like many financial institutions, it must balance ambitious transformation with operational stability and regulatory compliance. The Strategic Cell oversees all change initiatives across the business while ensuring continuity of day-to-day operations.

Before adopting a PPM tool, the firm relied on a set of inconsistent tools for project management.

Implementing Planview’s PPM software has significantly helped create governance, consistency, and central oversight for strategic project delivery. Actively used by around 500 people across the business, with 200–300 submitting timesheets to support internal project costing, the software plays a critical role across domains and business functions.

A wide range of use cases

• Portfolio visibility and prioritization: A single source of truth. Providing extensive visibility into active, planned, and delayed projects, the solution helps prioritize the right initiatives.
• Status and milestone reporting: Teams use the software to monitor progress, track milestones, and maintain consistent oversight.
• Risk and issue tracking: Risks are tiered, reviewed regularly, and directly tied to project health updates and status changes. This ensures escalation and resolution processes are followed.
• Project cost tracking: All project-related financial data is stored and managed in one place —which was especially pivotal in enabling time tracking and cross-charging.

What's more, an integration with Power BI effortlessly turns project and portfolio data into powerful, compelling visualizations for milestone changes, aiding in conflict detection.

Originally, Schroders relied on a small group of internal power users of the PPM tool. This created a concentration of technical knowledge. To mitigate this, they transitioned to using Planview's Managed Services Offering (MSO).

By moving from reliance on one or two internal experts to Planview's Managed Services Offering (MSO) with access to 60 consultants, Schroders eliminated key-person dependency and gained continuity and scalability at a cost comparable to in-house support.

Since June 2024, the MSO specialists have been operating as a fully embedded extension of the Schroders PMO team. MSO consultants have full access to Schroders systems (Teams, SharePoint, etc.) and participate in daily operations and planning as trusted advisors.

MSO Engagement: Key Facts and Figures

• 8 complex change requests completed in record time
• 1,080 tickets resolved with 100% SLA adherence
• Re-education efforts on ticket categorization

In addition to configuration work, system health checks and quarterly reviews, the MSO's strategic input has been instrumental in accelerating change implementation and user adoption.

The ongoing availability of trusted partners acting both as technical experts and consulting advisors earned Schroders some key wins:

Implementation of security groups

Proactive propositions from the MSO team helped the company address long-standing security concerns. Previously, any user could see any project—creating hesitation around entering sensitive data. In a matter of 10–12 weeks, MSO helped implement security groups across business lines. As a result, confidence and usage jumped immediately.

Rapid restructuring following organizational change

In another speed record, the MSO was able to reconfigure the tool—including field updates and realignments—in just 6–8 weeks after a major corporate reorganization.

Functionality benchmarking and enablement

Their functional mapping work uncovered gaps in usage—basically features Schroders was paying for but not using, like assumptions and resource planning— and shared how other organizations leverage them to enable deployment.

Finally, they helped avoid the cost of additional tools by extending the software beyond classic PPM needs. The platform is now set up to be used by non-project teams (e.g. marketing) purely for timesheeting, and by tech teams to track non-change work for visibility.