“For a CIO in transition or just starting out, Abraxio has the real strength to get IS teams moving fast.”

Like many CIOs, I spend – or should I say “used to spend” – far too much time consolidating information fragmented in multiple Excel spreadsheets; this was true for Tracking Projects, Budgets, financial and contractual commitments, and so on. This was true for tracking projects, budgets, financial and contractual commitments, etc. Quickly drawing up summary reports and integrating them into Powerpoint Dashboards was laborious and time-consuming.

Another point: even if Excel can be used to automate certain tasks, this is only valid for individual use. Sharing files with team members to ensure that information is complete is still a very risky business. And yet, it ‘s essential to delegate responsibility for tracking one’s own scope of action to the IS team, especially when you have around thirty Projects in your portfolio. It’s all the more important in matrix organizations, where it’s much more interesting to give responsibility and direct action to business line managers.

When you’ve got your nose to the grindstone, no compass, and a very broad functional and technical scope, it’s sometimes difficult to stop and take a step back. There can be a tendency to favor resourcefulness to the detriment of long-term skills development and training. And yet, in today’s fast-changing environment, it’s crucial to maintain a dynamic of professionalization.

When I started my assignment in March 2020, I already had in mind to equip and digitize the IS function. In my view, this is a highly effective way of professionalizing the team’s practices, boosting performance and enabling it to move on from “toolkit” IT to Service desk IT. Implementing a solution that is close to the Teams, easy to access and learn, is a^1st concrete marker of change.

Following the start of my assignment, I obviously took the time to audit and remedy the operational difficulties present when I arrived, but once these had been dealt with, I set up Abraxio.

For me, it was a real management tool, with the aim of helping the IS team to adopt a different approach to work organization, to better distinguish between long-term and short-term actions, and to better manage priorities. And it worked! The platform has been very well received by the whole team, especially as it’s easy to access, set up and update.

Whether you’re a transitional CIO or a newcomer just starting out, Abraxio has the real strength to get your IS Teams moving fast. When you arrive in an environment where vision has been lost, where it’s the last one to speak who’s right, with Teams in pain and chasing tasks with the feeling that they’re not moving forward, a vicious circle sets in that generates a lot of dissatisfaction, which needs to be reversed.

We started at the beginning of 2021 with the very simple and the very basic, and stepped up a notch each step of the way to exploit more and more functionalities.

In concrete terms: each team member began by creating and updating weekly tasks, which gave them a clearer picture of their individual activities and priorities, and enabled them to consolidate a vision of operations, in line with the evolution of the Projects. We used Abraxio to carry out individual activity reviews, team reviews and month-on-month projections of overall planning and project progress.

Gradually, all tasks were attached to projects, which made it possible to create a portfolio of projects, another of opportunities; and we continued to work our way up the chain: entering budget entries linked to the Finance module, introducing risks on certain key projects, the associated documentation, etc.

From now on, all new Projects are managed via Abraxio, which allows us to centralize and consolidate all information. The arrival of the new ISR in September 2021, who immediately adopted the tool, was the pretext for setting up regular portfolio reviews. It’s a real help when he takes up his new post, and for the IS master plan I’m working on.

I also had the opportunity to use Abraxio during a Steering committee meeting with elected officials. The issue at stake was to decide whether to outsource a Projects management mission. Abraxio helpedmake this decision objective: the presentation of the Projects portfolio showed the need for reinforcement, given the volume of projects to be addressed.

We’re clearly in the process of ramping up Abraxio’s Workload, with the team successfully taking ownership. Tomorrow, we’ll probably be moving on to the Vendors module, to manage contractors, contracts and their expiry dates more proactively, to be able to identify critical commitments and remain vigilant about compliance with the French Procurement Code. It’s a logical next step.

More unexpectedly, but nonetheless very interestingly, other departments within the local authority will be using Abraxio for their own Project management. Technical Teams (Water and Sewerage) in particular are faced with engineering challenges similar to ours, with multi-year investments and high levels of Service level Availability, and for them too, Excel-based management is reaching its limits.

The ^1st strength is that Abraxio is a turnkey, all-in-one solution, with very little dependence on the organization’s IS, which means it can be deployed very quickly. What makes Abraxio so successful is its ability to reconcile both a strategic vision (for example, being able to sort projects by issue, by level of priority, by strategic axis, in order to decide to allocate Resources where they will bring the greatest value) and a more operational vision of the unitary management of a project. They are inseparable, and you don’t waste time rebuilding or developing one in relation to the other, which is invaluable.

Secondly, there’s no doubt that the Finance dimension of the Abraxio platform is a real functional strength, quite unrivalled to my knowledge. Whether you need to track Opex and Capex management, have a multi-year view of projects or their commitment rate, or create forecasts or simulations, Abraxio integrates it all, and with ease of use: Abraxio integrates it all, and with ease of use.

The final benefit is ergonomics. You get the feeling that the tool has been designed with usage in mind, that it has been thought through by its designers as if they were CIOs or Projects managers themselves, with the ambition of meeting their needs. Abraxio has focused on ergonomics, time-saving, simplicity and ease of use, with a fairly uncluttered design, and has succeeded. We save a phenomenal amount of time, whether with on-the-fly data entry (rather than having to navigate through menus to edit parameters), or with real-time data updating without having to restart the tool. It’s quite impressive.