How I Turned a Time Tracker Into an Enterprise Platform Over 9 Years

Client: One of the world’s largest investment managers with $2.4 trillion in Assets Under Management (AUM) Role: Professional Services Consultant & Technology Lead Duration: 9 years

I spent nine years at one of the world’s largest investment management firms. Not as a full-time employee — as a professional services consultant and technology lead. Nine years is a long time to stay on one engagement, and people sometimes ask me how that happens. The short answer: the scope kept growing because we kept delivering.

Here’s how it started.

Walking Into the Mess

When I arrived, the firm had a PPM tool — HP PPM, later Microfocus PPM — and it was doing exactly one thing: tracking time. That’s it. No project management. No portfolio views. No budgeting. No executive visibility into where money was actually going across the technology organization.

On the BI side, the story was just as underwhelming. They had SAP BusinessObjects, Informatica ETL, Oracle databases — a perfectly capable stack sitting there, underutilized and disconnected. Executives were making investment decisions off spreadsheets that someone manually stitched together every month.

The data existed. Nobody had wired it into anything useful.

Here’s how I think about engagements like this: you don’t start by building the dream state. You start by fixing what’s bleeding.

Making the Data Stack Earn Its Keep

So that’s where I began. I stood up incoming integrations using Informatica PowerCenter and automated the entire user management process — dynamic org hierarchies, resource pool syncing based on location and billing type, all running without anyone touching it manually. That alone cut about 20% of the manual effort the team was burning through every week.

Then I built executive dashboards that pulled data from three separate systems — PPM, ITSM, and defect tracking — into a single consolidated cost view. Before that, leadership waited on monthly roll-ups. After, they had real-time spend data across the entire portfolio.

On the backend, I dug into Oracle SQL queries that had become performance bottlenecks, built data pipelines for SAP BW, and created trend dashboards that gave the organization forecasting capability it simply didn’t have before. Nothing fancy. Just connecting what was already there and making it fast enough to be useful.

The PPM Transformation Nobody Expected

The bigger story — the one that turned a 6-month engagement into a 9-year one — was what happened with the PPM tool itself.

HP PPM had an adoption problem. And the adoption problem was, at its core, a usability problem. People didn’t hate the concept; they hated the experience. Too many fields. Too many screens. Workflows that reflected the vendor’s assumptions about how work should flow, not how this firm actually operated.

So we rebranded the tool internally, stripped out everything that didn’t need to be there, simplified the workflows, and built custom applications to support how people actually worked. Then we started releasing new capabilities — carefully, incrementally. Project management first. Then portfolio views. Then investment tracking. Top-down budgeting. Finance management.

What started as a time tracker became a full-blown PPM suite. We let adoption drive the next feature, not the other way around. I ran office hours and training sessions as part of a broader change management effort, because adoption isn’t a technology problem. It’s a trust problem. You solve it by showing up consistently and making the tool genuinely easier than the workaround.

Turning a Cost Center Into an Asset

Once the platform proved its value, something interesting happened. Other business units wanted in. We extended the platform to 3 additional units within the organization and established a chargeback model — they paid for access to a system that was already built. No net-new development required.

A tool that started as a cost center became an internal revenue-generating asset. That’s the kind of outcome that keeps an engagement going.

The Cloud Move

We were the first team to move the system to Microfocus’s cloud when they launched their SaaS offering. Later, we transitioned to a third-party SaaS provider with better economics. I managed the full migration — customizations, data pipelines, the lot.

That move cut environment maintenance costs by 30%. Not a projected savings. Actual, realized cost reduction.

Knowing When to Fold

And then came the final chapter. The firm acquired ServiceNow licenses, and the question on the table was whether it made sense to keep running a separate PPM tool when ServiceNow could absorb those use cases — essentially making the tool free from a licensing perspective.

I was the one who ran that analysis. I built prototypes, presented use cases to leadership, and negotiated which capabilities needed to migrate first. Six months later, we were live on ServiceNow PPM. I stuck around through stabilization to make sure the transition landed cleanly.

Some consultants would have fought to keep their platform alive — it was, after all, the reason the engagement existed. But the right call was obvious. The firm was already paying for ServiceNow. Consolidating eliminated a licensing line item entirely and simplified the tooling landscape. Making that recommendation is part of doing the job properly.

By the Numbers

Nine years. One engagement. A time tracker that became an enterprise platform, scaled across business units, moved to the cloud, and then got deliberately folded into a better-fit solution.

The best technology decisions aren’t about picking the shiniest tool. They’re about knowing when to build, when to extend, and when to walk away. That sequencing is where the real value lives.