Canadian Pacific’s Journey towards Excellence 

Canadian Pacific (CP) is one of Canada’s oldest corporations.  From its inception almost 130 years ago, CP has developed into a technologically advanced Class 1 railway, providing rail and intermodal freight transportation services over a network serving principal business centers in Canada, the U.S. Midwest and the U.S. Northeast.  CP has over 15,000 employees, $13.6 billion in assets, and $5.0 billion in revenues.  Business operations within CP are supported by more than 400 Information Technology (IT) applications.   

In the past, the IT department has been challenged with the common pitfalls that many IT projects face:
o    Projects often utilized their own “homegrown” processes and tools.
o    Controls over project scope and execution were not consistently applied. 
o    Business requirements were missed or misunderstood. Each of these were contributors to inconsistent project outcomes which resulted in low internal customer satisfaction.  

The journey towards rebuilding IT began in 2009 and continued into 2010, resulting in a transformed team with a unified purpose focused on executing with excellence and operating as an integrated partner with the business.  This new leadership team’s mandate was to bring a renewed sense of energy to the IT department and to develop delivery capability.  Fresh ideas emerged along with a clear vision to create a true partnership between IT and the business by integrating business and technology strategies.  A key driver to enable IT to deliver greater business value was to understand the long term goals of the business.  Within the newly formed Project Management Office (PMO), the Business Analyst Centre of Excellence (COE) was created to support IT’s goal of greatly improving project delivery by promoting collaboration and standardization of best practices in Business Analysis. 

The PMO adopted a systematic approach to setting up the COE by defining milestones, deliverables and timelines as well as chartering strategies and goals. In order to track progress, success measures, benefits, risks and assumptions were identified and monitored - particularly in the early stages in order to adjust course as necessary. 

The BA COE started with the establishment of the solution delivery process. The solution delivery process is a consistent set of  project tools, simplified deliverables, and conventions that could be applied to the entire portfolio of IT projects and exemplified “standard work”. Checkpoints and stage gates were established to monitor project success and to ensure engagement of the business at critical project milestones.   

Next, job titles, accountabilities, and roles and responsibilities of project team members within the systems development lifecycle were delineated in order to help each one understand the interdependencies between the business subject matter experts, business analyst, project managers, architects, developers and the quality/testing professionals.  This work helped to build stronger teams and to focus each discipline area. 

A critical success factor was support, from a management, a business analyst, and a governance perspective.  At Canadian Pacific, the directive for the COE originated from the CIO so the concept was supported at the highest levels.  However, it was critical that the support cascaded down from the CIO through the General Managers to the program delivery managers, and project managers and that the advocacy was visible to the department.  Communication strategies were employed to ensure that every level of our IT department organizational hierarchy was advised of the COE value proposition. 

Through management sharing their vision, acceptance and even excitement surfaced from the business analysts.  Acknowledging that individuals respond to change differently, the BA COE focused efforts on early change adopters – those individuals who were willing and able to try new approaches.  Early adopters were able to coach and mentor others and they spread the word that the new process and changes really worked!  Tactically, the COE investigated all opportunities to celebrate successes and catch people “doing it right”.  This approach helped to  reinforce the adoption of best practices.  As an example, corporate awards were handed out to many early adopters who helped launch the COE.  This recognition went a long way – small token, big impact. 

Governance within the COE was implemented as a support mechanism for business analysts.  A coaching program was developed so the BA community knew where to go for assistance.  Formal stage gate reviews helped to ensure standards were being followed and project health checks, which give a snapshot of the pulse of a project at any point in time during the solution delivery lifecycle, were introduced. 

CP engaged an experienced IIBA aligned training partner and developed an in depth training program to arm our business analysts with the skills and capabilities needed to understand our stakeholders needs and to communicate, trace and validate requirements.  By modifying the generic training program to align the course material with CP’s solution delivery process, the information was more easily digested by our audience.  Having all our business analysts go through the program also built camaraderie amongst the workforce and many are proud to display the masters certificate in Business Analysis (George Washington University) that was achieved as a result of their studies.  In addition, the IT  leadership team invested in an IIBA corporate membership giving Business Analysts access to an abundance of online resources for further studies. 

Finally, to solidify what we learned and maintain momentum, we built a community of practice.  Community collaboration is simplified through our Business Analyst team site portal which serves as an outlet to promote sharing and promote best practices.  It includes news and announcements, a calendar of events, toolkits, relevant document links and tips and tricks.  Also, the community holds voluntary peer mentoring sessions to hone the facilitation, modeling and peer review skills of the group, building the confidence of the less experienced and creating the next generation of mentors.  Guest speakers provide ongoing opportunities to learn from other organizations. 

So where do you start?  It might seem a little overwhelming at first. It’s a process, so take the first step and think about how to continuously improve from there. Staff will understand that your Center of Excellence will not be “full service” at first but they will see that positive changes are being made and will rally behind structures and ideas that they see add value to their daily work.  Canadian Pacific is a large organization with lots of complexity – if we were able to make such a dramatic change in a short period so can you! 

See you at the BA World Conference in Calgary, Alberta in April 2011.

by Stephanie Arena, Canadian Pacific