French Ministry of Equipment adopts Groove and gains 25% in productivity

Customer Problem Definition:

Voies Navigables de France (VNF;French Waterways) manages the largest European ship canal network.
In a constantly changing environment, they need to:

• Structure cross organizational project management in a secured way,
• Improve business processes, shorten decision cycles,
• Prepare the scheduled incorporation of other public services into their current organization.

So, many different distributed teams are involved from different organizations [public sector, private sector]. Hence different networks and project skills have to work together efficiently.

Furthermore, the productivity improvments to achieve are far beyond usual project management and the usage of  "Gantt charts" with products like Microsoft Project®  or Intelligant® from TeamDirection Inc [independantly of their excellent quality].

In order to be successfull and achieve financial objectives, the only way was to start to think about how persons could better work together efficiently and find adequate technical solutions as a consequence.

Customer Solution Overview:

• Creation of a highly secured work environment for internal and external collaboration, build upon Groove^® technologies,
• Audit and consulting: Accompaniment before, during and after deployment,
• License delivery, product installation and configuration, hosted services bundled with internal infrastructure,
• Training at various levels: users, administrators and IT officers.

Generally speaking, when a governemental entity intends to work with another one, they need, from a security point of view, to establish bridges between them. If you are in a well defined process, this is quite well achieved as you can easily quantify how people must work and be compliant with the quality standards. When you need to get flexibility and adapt to a changing environment, this becomes more complex... especially if you need to keep "trust" and avoid exchanging tons of emails... Groove infrastructure was able to adapt to the security requirements (from a network to a person centric level point of view)  ...  

Benefits for VNF:

• Improvement of team work efficiency and project management,
• Highly secured environment,
• Flexibility and scalability.

"By deploying Groove and its project management module to secure and streamline request-for-proposal processing through our organization's decision-making and financial channels, we have achieved productivity gains of around 25% compared with the results obtained from our previous processes…"

Xavier Boulanger, IT Coordinator for Voies Navigables de France (VNF)