Pcubed Helps California State Automobile Association Manage Risk of $40 Million in Potential Project Overruns; Expert Consulting Team Focuses on Strategic Investments and Managing How Projects Are Executed

Business Wire, June 29, 2006

ANN ARBOR, Mich. -- Pcubed (Program Planning Professionals), the preeminent global project management consultancy, announced today that as a result of it's services to California State Automobile Association (CSAA), it has helped the organization develop and deploy standardized processes for project and program management, and has supported the risk mitigation on approximately $40 million in potential project cost overruns.

Having extensive experience in the insurance industry with clients such as Allstate, Fireman's Fund, One Beacon and Aegis, Pcubed was selected by CSAA to proactively and quickly undertake a gap analysis and implement expanded project and program management that covered infrastructure, processes and organization.

CSAA, the second largest affiliate of the national AAA organization, serves more than 4 million members from its San Francisco headquarters. Its 6000 employees generate over US 2$billion in revenues from a wide array of automotive, travel, insurance and financial services.

"Pcubed has delivered real value to our portfolio execution," Said Devon Johnson, Portfolio Manager at CSAA. "Combining marketplace available tools and Pcubed's expertise, we were able to implement a solution and migrate quickly. These processes and tools allowed our managers to manage schedules, issues, risks and supporting documents effectively. This has a direct impact in increasing the execution success of our programs."

Pcubed provided a solution roadmap to CSAA which defined quantifiable objectives that would support on time, on scope and on budget expectations. Four key solutions were driven by Pcubed consulting team:

1. Pcubed designed and implemented standardized program and project management processes and infrastructure.

Using a hosted environment, based on Microsoft technology, Pcubed designed processes and infrastructure to manage risks, issues, documents, inter-project dependencies, resource supply and demand management and cost. The result: Data is stored in a central repository database therefore improving automation for team member and increasing visibility and control for managers and executives.

2. Pcubed created driver based workplans supporting the key initiatives.

Following the defined processes and planning standards, Pcubed worked with CSAA to create work plans for all high priority projects. The result: Greater accountability for project team, sponsor and executives.

3. Pcubed delivered Earn Value Analysis tools and techniques.

To make sure projects delivered value, Pcubed supported the implementation of an earned valued analysis (EVA), thereby identifying whether projects were slipping on cost and schedule, or meeting their promised scope, and what action should be taken to correct any risk. The result: CSAA is now able to track Earned Value against all of their supported strategic initiative plans. Prior to the work with Pcubed only a few projects had any form of Earned Value reporting. This is a remarkably fast advancement of Project Management maturity over such a large range of projects.

4. Pcubed delivered standardized process adherence reports.

To keep all the plans well maintained, at high quality, with strong reporting, Pcubed designed standardized reports to monitor how effective CSAA managers were at complying with the new processes. Pcubed also helped to implement a performance process, and a reward program was implemented which tied directly to the measurement reports that Pcubed put into place. The result: CSAA Project Managers have dramatically increased their ability to keep plans up to date. A more positive work culture has been created, with actionable performance based metrics. And, importantly for the organization, the quality of data available from projects is much greater, allowing for senior managers to have real-time visibility of project and program delivery status.

About Pcubed:

Pcubed is a global program management services and solutions company, focused on helping clients deliver complex & critical programs. With offices in the United States, UK, Germany, France, Australia and Asia, Pcubed has a truly global presence.

Pcubed has a vast portfolio of successful client engagements, from multi-billion dollar government, automotive and infrastructure programs, to equally vital but smaller-scale information technology projects. Their focus is to use a collective knowledge of program and project management disciplines to help businesses deliver strategies and achieve objectives. In addition to providing hundreds of world-class project management consultants, Pcubed has unique cross-industry expertise in helping organizations shape and drive programs and implement enterprise project management. For more information, visit www.pcubed.com.

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