Reliance Industries Limited is amongst the fortune 500 companies and the
largest business house in India. For two consecutive years, Reliance has been
amongst the top 25 fastest growing companies in the world. Reliance currently
has more than 40,000 employees spread across various businesses and at various
locations. Having such a large workforce and keeping pace with the growth is no
piece of cake. One of the strategies instrumental in the growth has been the
harnessing of the knowledge amongst the workforce and sharing the same across
the group.
Some of the projects by Reliance which show their project management
abilities to the world are the famous mega projects like the Jamnagar Refinery,
Reliance Infocomm, etc. The scale of the project has always been the focal point
for the company. It is always a prime consideration for all of their projects,
but was never run on a project management basis.
Duplicity and a lack of systematic tracking resulted in a lot of redundant
applications and issues of quality. Project delays, understaffing and low
employee morale are the undesired outcomes. With RIL taking large strides in
business with Exploration, Retail, SEZ and several other allied businesses
coming in existence, it became even more important to manage all projects in a
systematic manner with real time information on progress available at any given
time.
IT teams started with labor intensive manual processes and Excel sheet based
practices initially. However, with the projects increasing, this became very
difficult and tracking the progress of projects and associated issues itself
became an issue for the company. A hunt for a tool to facilitate this effort
ended with the IT team developing an IT Project Management System (ITPMS). The
need to develop an in-house tool was heightened by the fact that readymade tools
either did not fit the RIL way of Project management or were extremely difficult
to implement, or had a low cost to benefit ratio.
Ashish is a well-known figure of the IT industry and has been the recipient of several industry awards. He was one of the founding members of the National Stock Exchange, and also worked as the CIO of Reliance Infocomm.
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This project had been originally deployed for IT team of Reliance Group
comprising of more than 2500 employees to achieve better results and have
transparency with the business teams.
However, several other non IT teams have started using the same system for
their project tracking activities. Key amongst them are Reliance Retail, Oil
Exploration project team and Reliance Life Sciences.
The project has already given the return within one year. Savings in terms of
tangible benefits due to consolidation and use of available knowledge has
resulted in savings of thousands of man days and operating efficiency at par
with industry best. Immense benefits in terms of improvement in the
organizational culture and employee participation is of paramount importance.
Access to various portals through a single sign on have already resulted in a
decrease in the number of calls received by the help-desk team by upto 50%. The
project was one of the central application services during the ISO certification
audit and was instrumental in getting us the certification. In the last one year
the system handled more than 3000 projects and currently around 1300 projects
are live.