Hyatt Hotels Corporation - Streamline their PMO

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Business Process
Automation Consultants

Hyatt Hotels Corporation is a leading global hospitality company guided by its purpose – to care for people so they can be their best. A recent project with Smarter Business Processes used Smartsheet and Smarter Launch Pad to enable them to formalise complex project dashboards, streamline their PMO across a large number of projects while managing varying governance requirements for individual projects.

Hyatt Hotels Streamline their PMO with Smartsheet and Smarter Launchpad

beautiful hyatt hotels streamline pmo across all hotel projects

The Challenge

As of September 30, 2023, the Hyatt Hotels Corporation portfolio included more than 1,300 hotels and all-inclusive properties in 76 countries across six continents. There is a growing need to streamline their PMO ensuring visibility of governance vitals across the organisation.

The Company’s offering includes brands in the Timeless Collection, including Park Hyatt®, Grand Hyatt®, Hyatt Regency®, Hyatt®, Hyatt Vacation Club®, Hyatt Place®, Hyatt House®, Hyatt Studios, and UrCove; the Boundless Collection, including Miraval®, Alila®, Andaz®, Thompson Hotels®, Dream® Hotels, Hyatt Centric®, and Caption by Hyatt®; the Independent Collection, including The Unbound Collection by Hyatt®, Destination by Hyatt®, and JdV by Hyatt®; and the Inclusive Collection, including Impression by Secrets, Hyatt Ziva®, Hyatt Zilara®, Zoëtry® Wellness & Spa Resorts, Secrets® Resorts & Spas, Breathless Resorts & Spas®, Dreams® Resorts & Spas, Hyatt Vivid Hotels & Resorts, Alua Hotels & Resorts®, and Sunscape® Resorts & Spas. Subsidiaries of the Company operate the World of Hyatt® loyalty program, ALG Vacations®, Mr & Mrs Smith™, Unlimited Vacation Club®, Amstar DMC destination management services, and Trisept Solutions® technology services.

How to manage IT projects and streamline a PMO across the Hyatt Universe

As the company grows the challenge of managing fundamental processes consistently across all sites grows too. Hyatt wanted to formalise a complex project management process and build an IT solution which would automate the launching of the required assets and enable more integrated, cross-functional collaboration between 10 key business units, but leave the business units accountable for their projects too.

The projects range from business-critical work against strategic objectives to repeatable jobs delivered by a department. The level of governance of the projects was also important to build into the solution, streamline the project management process with high impact strategic projects being visible to members of the board and lower-level projects reporting progress but not in as detailed a way.

The Vision

Angela Steele, AVP Technology Strategy & Project Management, had the vision and knew that Smartsheet could be the tool to use, but needed assistance in designing and building this PMO solution.

The Solution

SBP spent time with Hyatt, mapping out the vision into a Project Management Process Model. From this model SBP designed and built out Angela’s vision using Smartsheet as the core product and using their own app Smarter Launch Pad to facilitate the creation of the project assets dependent on the governance level required.

Dashboards were used effectively to guide business units to the high governance projects requiring their involvement and to provide a way to create lower-level projects to track progress there also using Smarter Launch Pad. Business Units can request cross functional project work, and they are also able to promote their lower-level projects into the higher governance projects if required.

The Complexity

High tier project template sets include Project Charter, Gantt Plans, Raid Logs, Executive Summary updates, List of useful resources and all dashboarding and reporting to surface progress across all. Lower tier project templates are just a Key Milestones sheet (in Gantt Format).

Each business unit has customised High Tier and Low Tier templates meaning that Smarter Launch Pad is assimilating 11 intake sheets and selecting from a set of 22 templates.

The Benefits

The many benefits that Hyatt experienced enabled a more streamlined Project Management system, with templates and automation to manage all the projects efficiently, including:

Hyatt is now using a centralised Project Management system with a documented Process.
Templates are used to create the assets across the whole organisation, meaning all projects are being managed in a consistent manner.
Complete visibility of progress is now available for all levels of projects.
Business Units are able to track and monitor tasks for cross functional work.
Automation is now used to create the Smartsheet items required to manage the projects – this reduces bottlenecks and human error in creation of assets.

TESTIMONIAL

“SBP has been integral in helping Hyatt develop a solution that can meet the needs of our increasingly complex and rapidly growing organization. This solution will enable Hyatt’s ability to scale through automation, while also allowing for flexibility using different templates to support a wide range of projects across the organization.

SBP helped us design, develop, and deliver the solution in under 3 months, and we have already identified several more opportunities to continue our partnership with SBP. “

Angela Steele, AVP Technology Strategy & Chief of Staff to the CIO, for the Hyatt Hotels Corporation

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