Image: Monetra
Monetra is a non-profit in-house group. Monetra’s regional companies provide Finland’s most diverse services to municipal actors. Monetra’s professionals produce financial management and HR services, as well as a comprehensive selection of other support services.
(www.monetra.fi)
Service Director Eero Karppinen says that Monetra uses Thinking Portfolio’s project, application and customership portfolios to manage the maintenance of client information, internal development and activities, thus ensuring a first-class service to its clients.
Thinking Portfolio has been a natural choice for a portfolio provider for Monetra for many reasons. The pricing model for services is clear – one monthly fee entitles you to unlimited access to the portfolios – and the implementation of the portfolios has been extremely smooth. The latest addition to Monetra’s environment was the customership portfolio, which was almost built from scratch, according to Eero Karppinen. Despite this, the implementation was quick and smooth, thanks to the agile project approach.
“In the implementation of the portfolios, the development targets do not have to be defined from the outset, but instead we can introduce the best practices quite quickly. The implementations have been good experiences. We are very satisfied with the portfolios and would not want to exchange them. On the contrary, we will expand their content. Now that we are using all these portfolios, we have still only seen the tip of the iceberg of all the benefits we can reap from the whole. We have previously also compared alternatives, but other providers don’t have a comparable product in these kinds of environments.”
In Thinking Portfolio’s multi-portfolio environment, users are created only once, and they are able to navigate all portfolios with different access rights, as necessary. The customerships that belong to a certain project can be selected for it, and the projects that involve the client will be shown automatically. Correspondingly, the application portfolio’s applications can also be selected through the customership portfolio.
The transparency of the information and the summaries that the portfolios can provide to support decision-making, even in real time, are important to management. The necessary information does not have to be sought elsewhere, as everyone can go and see the portfolio views, if they want to.
“During portfolio reviews, I have received feedback, such as, ‘This is so great, all this other information one can find here’. We are constantly learning to take more advantage of the information provided by the portfolios. This is indeed a great leap forward from Excels. Even though the Excels are good, we don’t like them so much that we wouldn’t like Thinking Portfolio even more.
User feedback has generally been positive and uniform. The end users agree that the threshold to start using the portfolios is very low, and the learning process is quick. People have said that the portfolio environment is very user-friendly, and it helps you manage exactly the things it was intended to manage.”
The project portfolio ensures a high-quality start to client cooperation and its continuous development
It is important to Monetra that new customerships are received in a quality manner, and that the client cooperation begins smoothly. These new client projects are managed in the Thinking Portfolio project portfolio, similarly to the clients’ new services implementation and developments projects.
All other development work is also managed in the project portfolio, for example, measures related to the future wellbeing services counties, in addition to the services for the current client groups.
Development project include, for example, the standardisation of services, calls for tenders for various systems and also the internal development projects of organisations. In addition to the projects, users have added to the portfolio tasks, which do not necessarily meet the project criteria but are included in the other daily workload of the project workers. In this way, Thinking Portfolio provides you with an overall picture of the organisation’s workload and the load factors for individuals and thus helps you perform the possibly necessary replanning of resources.
“The starting point with taking content to the project portfolio is to get an understanding of what the limited amount of development resources are used for at a given time and what will they be used for in the future. This view helps to ensure that we can perform the planned development work with quality and at the same time serve our clients and assure them of a premium continuous service.”
Thinking Portfolio’s customership, project and application portfolios link together well
In addition to the applications, their integrations, which currently number around 700 in the portfolio, are managed in Monetra’s application portfolio. Integration management is central to Monetra’s operational model, and this further emphasises the importance of the application portfolio.
The latest Thinking Portfolio’s portfolio that has been implemented is the customership portfolio, which is intended for the maintenance of client information and control of services.
At Monetra, the implementation of the customership portfolio certainly indicated that the Thinking Portfolio’s platform is flexible and can handle almost anything, and many kinds of processes could have been carried out with it. The common thread, however, was that we should define the portfolio based on our own requirements while applying the best practices experiences that Thinking Portfolio has accumulated with other clients.
“Thinking Portfolio’s customership, project and application portfolios link together well. In this way, we can make the customerships and the overall picture necessary for producing the services more transparent to our staff that is carrying them out. A good indication of the versatility of the project platform is also the fact that the instructional videos about the use of the project portfolio, which we had ordered earlier, could also be used in the training for our customership portfolio. Certain logics are universal in all Thinking Portfolio portfolios.
“Thinking Portfolio’s consultants have done their job well with regard to the implementation of the portfolios – they don’t guide you too much, but they guide you enough. We like the fact that different options have been suggested to us, and it’s been easy to select the right approach for us for the portfolio from them. If you need help from Thinking Portfolio, you can always get it. Special thanks for the latest implementation, which was for the customership portfolio, finished in an exemplary manner.
Eero Karppinen
Service Director, Deputy CEO
