Averaging about 2,000 projects per year, Sabre Holdings Corp. employs roughly 3,000 software developers to keep its offerings—including mega-site travelocity.com—on the cutting edge of the constantly changing travel industry.
Greg Bronson began as a software developer at the company 21 years ago and now serves as director of portfolio management. He discusses how Sabre is using project management to reach new heights.
How does project management further Sabre's strategic goals?
Sabre has a planning process that drives alignment between projects and market needs. Through it, business initiatives that help meet strategic objectives, such as growth in a specific market, are identified. Since all projects are linked to business initiatives and business initiatives are linked to strategic objectives, Sabre always knows what is being done to further the company's strategic objectives.
Is project management consistently employed across the enterprise?
Sabre is composed of three business units: Travelocity, Sabre Travel Network and Sabre Airline Solutions. Each one has an operations team responsible for the project management practices used in their unit. Though all three groups are independent, they all share information and best practices, and they come together as needed for corporate-wide project management initiatives. This allows each group to customize project management practices for the unique aspects of their business.
Sabre has a perspective that project management is net a destination, but a journey.
What are the primary benefits that Sabre recognizes from project management methods?
For Sabre, project management is about bringing visibility to our investment in our software products.
This includes knowing the projects in the pipeline and understanding the resources required to develop the portfolio.
In support of that, at the beginning of 2007, Sabre implemented an ongoing process that establishes a product plan for the following five quarters of projects. At the end of each quarter, another quarter of projects is added.
The final 2008 product plan was ready for the board in five weeks—versus six months in previous years—and included much more analysis and justification than previous years.
Ongoing product planning allows Sabre's marketing and sales staffs to nominate new projects as they identify needs in the marketplace versus saving project ideas for the annual planning process. It keeps project ideas fresher, the development pipeline full and allows easy adjustment of the delivery sequence by pushing lower-priority projects further out in the pipeline versus removing them from the plan.
What's unique about how Sabre approaches project management?
Sabre has a perspective that project management is not a destination, but a journey. Changes in the marketplace occur rapidly in the travel industry, and this drives changes in our internal operations and procedures, including project management.
We periodically stop and ask the question: What level of project management is required today? What practices are too cumbersome and should be streamlined? What new processes are required? What existing ones should be strengthened? What issues can be addressed through project management processes? If there is no value to the company, we want to stop using the process. PM