Nordea Bank Abp (Nordea), is a European financial services group operating in Northern Europe. The bank is the result of the successive mergers and acquisitions of the Finnish, Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian banks. Nordea is listed on Nasdaq Nordic exchanges in Helsinki, Copenhagen, and Stockholm and Nordea ADR is listed in the US.
Nordea serves 9.3 million private and 530,000 active corporate customers, including 2,650 large corporates and institutions. There are four Business Areas (BAs) at Nordea, Personal Banking, Business Banking, Large Corporates & Institutions, and Asset & Wealth Management. Assets under Management (AUM) were €411 billion in December 2021.
When Projectum first met Nordea, the challenge presented was that their PPM solution for time reporting and PPM matters was costly in software licenses, lacking user-friendliness and integration capabilities. Nordea was also experiencing a high degree of continuous development, as opposed to configuration capabilities, and was lacking out-of-the-box functionality with an easy path to Jira integration. They were looking for increased user-friendliness and the ability to remove some of the “red tape” prohibiting a true anchoring of Project Portfolio Management in the organization.
It was soon clear that Nordea was looking for a partnership to implement a modern PPM Solution. The outcome was a close relationship between Nordea and Projectum, centered around Projectum’s products, Power PPM and Time for Teams, with the following goals in mind:
A key factor to the successful partnership between Projectum and Nordea has been the collaboration, which also played an important role in the initial decision phase for Nordea. “We wanted a partner, not just a supplier/customer relationship – we wanted a true partnership, in allowing us to go the extra mile together.” Most of the collaboration has been virtual, and ambitious timelines were set for the implementation phase, but even with the physical distances, both parties managed to build a strong partnership where Projectum consultants have dedicated their time to support Nordea, whenever help has been needed.
“I think we can say that it has been a pleasure working with Projectum. The Projectum PPM Consultants and other professionals have been very accommodating and are very skilled. It has been a good dialogue and very positive and accommodating – and we have the sense that we’re in it together. That has been really appreciated”.
Head of Project Portfolio Managers and PMO Group CIO Office, Nordea
In a near future, Nordea has already stated that the next phase will be to extend capabilities within portfolio management and portfolio planning. Nordea have ambitions of looking into a set of areas e.g. OKR’s, ideation, resource forecasting, scenario planning. All areas of which Projectum offers tools within. Particularly within the area of strategy planning and execution, where Power PPM includes a feature for OKR’s and roadmaps, which would allow Nordea to harvest the strategic benefits and accomplish overall strategic objectives by getting the strategic direction from a portfolio perspective.
“We are looking forward to getting an even better data quality surrounding our initiatives, as well as benefit-tracking, and then use it to aggregate it to portfolio level – and then it is all about the portfolio level and reports that goes to the management. This will give us an even better foundation for decision making.”
Head of Project Portfolio Managers and PMO Group CIO Office, Nordea
