Standard and Poor's Index Services PMO and Tools

Standard and Poor's provides the S&P 500 and over one milion other market indexes to customers around the world.  S&P sought to improve efficiency for introducing new index products while supporting its existing portfolio of standard and custom indexes. They needed improved projects organization and tracking capability.

Approach

A Markets Technolgy & Compliance consultant established a Project Management Office within the index operations and new product delivery area to provide greater transparency to existing activities and ensure effective budgeting and resource allocation for new initiatives. During the engagement, we:

• Compiled and prioritized various initiatives in process and under consideration.

• Defined a new initiatives pipeline, and stratified projects by business domain.

• Defined criteria for introducing new products, including ROI, risk factors, and impact on operating efficiency and processing infrastructure

• Facilitated prioritization and approval of new initiatives

• Established means of determining and communicating portfolio delivery tradeoffs when rushed initiatives are introduced

• Developed project reporting and staff resource usage metrics and reporting tools

After enabling the PMO, we worked with the client to rapidly select and implement a centralized reporting tool. After a brief survey of available platforms, we recommended Daptiv, and implemented this SaaS On Demand platform in two weeks.

Results

The new indices delivery program improved immediately, as management in new product development, sales, operations, and new product delivery all gained a common, up to date understanding of existing initiatives status and the timing of new products. The Daptiv platform provided immediate feedback on projects and staff productivity, and is used to schedule and forecast new projects and set timeline expectations. An added benefit of the PMO was improved justification of new products.