BT Financial Group, the investment management arm of Australian banking conglomerate Westpac Banking Corporation, has saved more than $540,000 (Australian) per year through a SharePoint-based portal designed to help the company track metrics related to the IT projects built for different business units within the firm each year.

With more than $64 billion (Australian) in funds under management, BT Financial manages more than 100 IT projects for various business units within the firm each year ranging from new applications to feature changes and upgrades. As part of its quality control, the firm continually tracks metrics, feedback and reported bugs or glitches related to the projects. However, the process for collecting these metrics was manual. The bulk of the work fell to two IT staffers who had to manage and review the information collected on various spreadsheets.

“We ended up with hundreds of spreadsheets and no central database of quality metrics,” says Andrew James, corporate systems manager in BT Financial Group’s Application and Services department. “We couldn’t get people in other business units to help us collect these metrics because it was too much of a manual system.”

Working with Microsoft Gold Certified Partner livePoint, BT Financial implemented a new workflow process using Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007. Office SharePoint Server 2007 includes XML-based electronic forms that integrate with existing systems, making it easy to develop and deploy forms-based workflow processes that can be accessed through the Microsoft Office InfoPath client or a Web browser.

After gathered requirements from the IT group and business units and holding a workshop with BT Financial senior analyst programmers, livePoint designed a pilot project for automating the tracking of metrics and glitches. The system extracts data automatically from BT Financial Group’s internal systems, and allows project managers to review and modify the information and send forms to the appropriate people for approval or further modification. It can automatically alert users to certain errors. Approved forms are stored centrally to allow the IT department to more easily aggregate and analyze data.

BT Financial then hired BearingPoint to assess the savings of the new system. The BearingPoint analysis showed that the automated system saved each of BT Financial Group’s 40 project managers a little over three hours per week, which over the course of a year totals just under 5,000 hours and a financial saving of nearly $490,000 (Australian). An additional 420 hours-per-year were saved by the two IT members who had managed and organized the spreadsheets, for an additional savings of $50,000 (Australian) or $540,000 (Australian). The project has also improved the timeliness and quality of the information collected, allowing the BT Financial IT Group to improve quality of service.

Moving forward, BT Financial is planning a further rollout of SharePoint Server to other areas of the company.