Success Stories

Carlyle Group Investment in Daptiv PPM Delivers Big Returns

The Carlyle Group is a global private equity firm with $81 billion under management committed to 60 funds. Carlyle invests in buyouts, venture & growth capital, real estate and leveraged finance in Africa, Asia, Australia, Europe, North America and South America focusing on aerospace & defense, automotive & transportation, consumer & retail, energy & power, financial services, healthcare, industrial, infrastructure, technology & business services and telecommunications & media. Since 1987, the firm has invested $43 billion of equity in 774 transactions for a total purchase price of $230 billion. The Carlyle Group employs more than 1,000 people in 21 countries. In the aggregate, Carlyle portfolio companies have more than $87 billion in revenue and employ more than 286,000 people around the world.

Business Challenge

In 2005, Carlyle reviewed their project management process for their global IT team located in Washington, DC, New York, London, Hong Kong and San Francisco. “We determined that projects and project requests could be better managed,” says David Roth, CIO.

“There wasn’t enough communication about the status of projects and everyone was using their own approach to managing projects, which created inconsistency.” Across the IT team and contractors, everything from Microsoft Word and Excel to MS Project was being used – without a streamlined methodology in place.

“We wanted a way to improve project and portfolio management quality and consistency,” explains Roth. “Project managers were burdened with frequent project updates because processes weren’t aligned and it took up too much time.”

Carlyle needed a project management and collaboration solution with an easy-to-use interface that would help team members gain immediate visibility into projects and enforce a method of tracking, updating and executing projects. Roth wanted the flexibility and convenience of on-demand, which lead him to SaaS (Software as a Solution).

lnvesting in a Solution

The company began looking into different project management and collaboration vendors on the Web. “We tested four different project management tools but were soon frustrated with the user interface. They were too clunky and cumbersome,” says Roth. Then Carlyle stumbled upon Daptiv (then eProject). “We heard about Daptiv and looked into Daptiv’s PPM (Project and Portfolio Management) tool,” explains Roth.

Before choosing Daptiv as their software provider, Carlyle attended one of Daptiv’s online product demonstrations to gain a better understanding of how Daptiv PPM can impact the mid-office. “We really liked the simple user interface of Daptiv PPM – that was important to us,” says Roth. “We also liked the easy-to-use features, such as the templates, dynamic applications and document repository.” After attending Daptiv’s user conference, the roll out of Daptiv PPM to Carlyle’s IT team was facilitated by additional tools and support. “With the direction of some great online tutorials, we could really sell the benefits to the team members who could easily learn how to use the Daptiv tool,” explains Roth.

Value

With Daptiv PPM in place, “There is increased project visibility and transparency. Now, there is a simple and effective way to manage projects and portfolios, which impacts the quality and consistency of the work we turn around,” says Roth. After implementing the Daptiv tool, it has become evident that “Daptiv PPM ties in more than just project management. It is a portfolio management tool, and the fact that it is a low-cost, low-risk software solution provides us with additional flexibility and cost benefits,” says Roth.

In addition to using Daptiv PPM to help manage IT projects, Carlyle has found an additional way to utilize the tool for IT efforts. “We use several dynamic applications to help plan for new office build outs; we have about 20 offices to plan and the dynamic applications help us with the work breakdown structure.”

Over the years as a Daptiv customer, Carlyle has seen positive changes in the product, continuing to validate their choice. “We see a lot of value in Daptiv’s quarterly updates,” says Roth. “The functionality, performance and look and feel of Daptiv PPM has improved continuously over the years that Carlyle has been a customer.”