Transforming the IT–business relationship and focusing on value with AirSaas — Comexposium

The context: key figures, company, etc.

The French leader in events, operating major trade shows such as the Foire de Paris and the agriculture, student, and motor shows, but also food, fashion… and even specialised business gatherings like the Assises de la Cybersécurité. The French group, a specialist in events, is growing strongly, with more than 150 professional and consumer events and 69 brands across 22 countries.

The challenge: involving the business in the projects

Arriving in a context of heavy technical and managerial debt, with large data projects, Stephan set out to avoid the traditional traps of the IT–business relationship and its endless-laundry-list mode.

In that context of digital acceleration, the key challenge was to act and collaborate quickly. That required putting IT and the business into a continuous movement of adaptation to the environment. For Stephan, that operating model is hard — even impossible — to run with Word, Excel and PowerPoint!

The solution: digitalise the old Excel project portfolio with AirSaas, involving the business and the executive team

Reinvigorating the project portfolio

During the COVID crisis, the core of Comexposium's business came to a stop. The events expert took the opportunity to reorganise both the business functions and IT.

In the reorganisation of IT's activity and of the business begun during the Covid crisis, one workstream focused on IS/digital topics and in particular the project sheet.

The answer was to better structure the framing and tracking sheets.

Stephan first introduced a portfolio in Excel, with a project sheet containing the weather, the costing, the expected benefits, and so on.

Those Excel-format sheets and PowerPoint-format reports couldn't answer the question: so where do things stand? What are our priorities? And in the end they couldn't involve both the business and the executive team.

That's when Comexposium looked on the market for a digitalised equivalent of the project sheet. They weren't looking for a complex all-in-one tool with too broad a scope — budget, project, planning, application mapping… not an ERP for IT! Just a digitalised portfolio with project sheets. And automated project reporting features.

The AirSaas integration unfolded in two main phases: a first one involving IT + the business, which lasted barely two months. And today a second stage involving executive leadership.

For Stephan, “the key is to provide relevant information and to have the means to keep it alive as things happen, because you don't need to wait for a leadership or project committee to meet in order to communicate what's going on.”

Relying on AirSaas to keep the key IT / business / leadership rituals alive

Our CIO points out that the challenge of involving the business in projects isn't solved by a tool alone, however useful it is.

That said, Comexposium was able to take advantage of the tool's implementation to define key roles and prerogatives for every stakeholder in the projects.

Alongside the tool, four steering bodies and their associated rituals are run:

IT committee, business committee, leadership committees and "Quarterly Business Reviews" (QBRs).

1. The IT committees (production and projects)

In that body Comexposium created two types of meeting: an operational committee where they work only on production topics — incidents, operations, support — purely each project's operations.

The second committee is held every other week. There, the teams are in AirSaas with a more “IT” orientation. Worth noting among the good practices: Stephan asks the teams to update the tool the day before that committee.

“In our IT committee we go through the vigilance points, successes and decisions to be taken on the projects directly in AirSaas.”

1. The business committees

Those bodies are verticalised by major function: sales, marketing, finance, etc.

Every function's lead is involved in using AirSaas and qualifying the projects. Among their prerogatives is going through the tool to update the key data shortly before the committees. The objective is to have an IT / business / sponsor team on every project.

1. The leadership committees

In that body the use is different: it's on demand — thanks to tracking from AirSaas I can provide an up-to-date view in real time.

1. The Quarterly Business Reviews (QBRs).

In that body two aspects are targeted first: the evolution of the budget and of the prioritisations with the chairman, based on the business cases.

The quarterly business review (QBR) ritual is now run with the platform's support. Anything that isn't up to date in AirSaas can't go to QBR.

Bonus section / questions:

What sets AirSaas apart from the other tools you considered?

Its ease of use! With AirSaas you avoid the IT-ERP effect; simplicity is the strong point.

Today the tool lets Comexposium do project governance, programme governance and soon cross-functional governance. Interfaced with Teams for communication and with a project-planning tool like Wrike, Jira or Asana, with this HUB they have a global view from strategy to execution; the tool has become a “must have” for the IT / sponsor / executive teams.

Your favourite feature?

Depending on the day, I appreciate two features. The first is the view of the complete portfolio. What I like when I land on it is having all my project sheets in a single kanban view. Having every project to hand with the different business committees is really pleasant! There's genuinely an organised, directly visual quality that helps you find your way.

The other feature I think of is the alert feed at the top right of AirSaas, on the little bell 🔔. That's where I find every alert surfacing; it's really my favourite feature. Seeing the little green dots answers the question: what happened today?

How do you calculate AirSaas's ROI?

It was fairly simple to assess. We looked at the time spent by the external PMO, which took 2 to 3 days a month to consolidate the Excel portfolio file and report the state of play of project execution in a PowerPoint — at the risk of forgetting the important decisions to be taken.

Set against the price of the AirSaas licences, we have a clear return on investment.

All the more so since the PMO's assignment time is now used to run the committees' working process and drive momentum around the solution!

A new AirSaas feature you'd like in future?

Yes, I think for now there's one small missing piece. It's the ability to produce cross-cutting minutes across several projects — either at programme level or at cross-functional business level. When we produce our record of information, decisions and actions after a business committee versus a project, that's what I'm missing today. That said, we have the option of working around it by creating a cross-functional project. I noted that this feature was on the roadmap shared by the vendor in its online user club.

Quick bio - Stephan Boisson

A graduate of the ISIMA engineering school, Stephan began his career at the Loxam group, where he progressed to head the IT department, helping accelerate the information system's performance. After three years in IT at Mazars, he joined SCC France, where he coordinated the transformation of the information systems. In 2019, Stephan Boisson joined the Comexposium group as Group CIO. Since then he has contributed to its growth and internationalisation strategy and to implementing the tools that enable hybrid work.