Strengthening trust with the business units with AirSaas — Indexia Group

Four months after the rollout began, the time has come for Sylvain Bourdette's first assessment of usage. The ever-moving CIO of Indexia Group looks back with us at the challenges he faced and the various solutions he brought.

A climbing enthusiast, this CIO of a 3,000-person group based in Romans-sur-Isère was the lead climber on this rollout of a modern project-portfolio tool.

Before / After AirSaas?

Before AirSaas was rolled out, an Excel sheet listed the 80 existing projects within IT.
The problem: with many small projects and data being added, the file quickly became unworkable. Adding data gradually made the tool obsolete. What's more, project-prioritisation meetings with the business were getting harder and harder to organise, since they were partly based on that Excel tracking file.

A context of hypergrowth and transformation

Indexia is historically an affinity insurer that has become a services operator and a "retailer". Its key figures tell the transformation story: 3,000 employees, eight million customers, 2,500 partners and an estimated €1.26bn in revenue in 2022.
Since its launch in September 2020, their Hubside.Store brand, specialising in new and refurbished multimedia, has already opened 120 points of sale. Exponential growth that earned it a place in the prestigious French Tech 120 cohort.

The challenge: having, as a CIO, a clear and up-to-date status of the various projects

“When you have 80 projects in parallel, you need synthetic views. To have the right information immediately, to know what's going into production in the current month”.

With a great many small projects that can drag on, the tracking sheet used previously had become unfit.

“We wanted more and more information, so we added more and more columns, statuses, dates, weather, comments… and in the end… it became illegible, unusable”, Sylvain Bourdette admits.

When the CIO wanted to produce progress reporting, he had to filter one way, then the other, and copy-paste to get the information into a PowerPoint

“We spent solid hours on it”! Sylvain recalls — all that, “for a result where the file was never completely up to date, nor with the right status”. #QED

The solution: more than a reporting tool — a value-centred tool adopted by the project managers!

“The challenge of having a clear, up-to-date status of the projects is completely met with AirSaas!”, Sylvain Bourdette says straight away.

“Where before, project managers could see updating the Excel file as a burden that brought them nothing, now, putting AirSaas in place has given them a tool that fits and that they use daily.”

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More than a reporting use, AirSaas has become, within Indexia's IT department, a project-management tool centred on value. Project managers can centralise their notes and documents there, record the decisions to be taken and each project's milestones. “They know where they stand.” For Sylvain, that made it possible to bring the project managers into the approach, which was one of the objectives.

Running portfolio reviews differently

Until now, running project-prioritisation meetings with the business units was quite hard to organise, because it had to rely on that famous Excel file that had become unfit.

Now having AirSaas and views by department makes it possible to filter and see every project at once. Sylvain noticed another significant point: “it also made it possible to put in front of the business units, clearly, all the other projects running in parallel”. To get a better sense of IT's overall plan. In the Excel file, users didn't see that simultaneity of every project at once, nor their milestones.

“It lets us share the reality of our job better. We have a certain capacity to deliver projects, we're already running three and we can't do more. That point really helps in a prioritisation meeting. Because it's visual, it's factual.”

It even makes it possible to bring back certain backlog projects that the business itself had forgotten… The tool, for its part, doesn't forget :-).

All of that goes in the direction of better transparency with the business. One of the key values practised by this “business partner” CIO.

For Sylvain, projects succeed above all because you have a relationship of trust with the business. “You can't have a client-supplier relationship; when there's a problem we'll look for solutions together rather than for culprits”.

Saving time and strengthening the bond of trust with the business

Today, after only a few months of rollout, AirSaas is in the adoption phase within IT. The next phase is to open it to certain business users who are the biggest requesters of projects.

The goal is very much for them to use it. The idea is to have more factual exchanges. In his view, in time “the fact that everyone can contribute and add attention points and decisions in AirSaas is a key factor in limiting the excess of emails and meetings.” He's convinced: “it's going to save us time.”

He points out that it's in the interest of both IT and the business. For IT, being able to record events at any hour. And for the business, having a real-time view of the plan. And not a “doctored” report.

For Sylvain, it's essential that the business units know where to find the information on request tracking. Knowing it's at their disposal can help strengthen the bond of trust with IT — regardless of whether they go and look at it or not. They know that if they need it… the information is there!

Bonus section:

AirSaas's strong point?

If he had to present it to a fellow CIO, Sylvain would mention: “being able to generate the steering-committee PowerPoint in one click — it's magic!”

A long-time project expert, our CIO points out: “In project management, we've all tried MS Project at some point! And MS Project is too complicated for our era!”.

Asked about what makes the solution singular, he specifies: “AirSaas is different from the other products. It's a tool for doing healthy reporting and steering. With slightly “looser” project management, and focusing on the important points — the decisions and attention points, rather than trying to find out whether a developer spent a day here or there; that's not the point, in fact!”.

When Indexia started looking at what tools existed, they shortlisted two or three. “We went ahead with AirSaas because we were able to run a POC very easily.” Beyond the feedback on the pre-sales, our interviewee tells us: “We felt very well supported and we could sense they wanted it to work, that they were passionate about their subject!”

Your favourite feature?

“I really like the decisions and attention points. Because until now, when we had that kind of need, we'd send an email or hold a meeting”.

Very often, working by email didn't produce a precise answer, and therefore no decision. Likewise, the meeting didn't necessarily have the minimum quorum of people present.

Sylvain tells us that now he starts all his business meetings by logging into AirSaas and filtering every assigned decision and attention point that's pending… before the topic of the day!

“Being able to record that a project needs a decision before a given date, that it's a specific person who has to take it, and that it's organisational, financial or otherwise in nature, simplifies governance. Being able to “log” decisions in a project is magic!”

How do you calculate AirSaas's ROI?

As a pragmatic CIO, Sylvain confirms: “It's not a question we asked ourselves in those terms. Common sense tells you the tool brings good things relative to an invoice that isn't outsized… I don't even try to calculate an ROI”; the results are there!".

A new AirSaas feature you'd like in future?

“What would be great… is a feature that lets the business units or users vote on projects.”

The idea being to let contributors make their case by saying: “this project contributes to revenue. That one contributes to a given company objective, this one contributes 2 stars… It would be interesting to allow voting. To have a scoring established, in a way, ahead of the steering meetings.”

From that consultation, Sylvain pictures a business-leadership meeting where he could share the voting results. That would give a first sense of overall prioritisation.

A feature reminiscent of agile games like planning poker and buy-a-feature.

Mini bio

An ever-moving CIO. Sylvain Bourdette has some twenty years' experience in the IT world — a path from developer to CIO, a role he held for around ten years in telecommunications, notably at SFR and Numericable.
He is currently Group CIO of Indexia, a company specialising in affinity-insurance distribution.
A climbing enthusiast, he applies one maxim daily: “plan for the unpredictable and manage the unexpected”.