By Elton Cane

The late 1990s and the turn of the millennium was a time of aggressive investment in technology in many industries – including financial services, which is second only to the defense sector in IT spending. But like many other industries, it saw a significant downturn in IT budgets after the dot.com bubble burst and stock markets fell.
    Then in 2002, things started to turn around, and many banks began to revive projects that had been put on hold and also pursue new ones. The move to Web-based And these were all arriving in
different formats and different languages. It was at this stage that we really identified the need for an enterprise portfolio project management system.”
IN NEED OF METHODOLOGIES
    Previously, the bank had no real methodologies in place for project management, and although it operated within ISO 9000 standards for its processes, it relied on the experience of project managers who had been with the company for some time.
    “Using Word document templates that weren’t always completed correctly and sending e-mail attachments back and forth was inefficient,” says Remzi.
    Antoine Sreih, head of Regional IT for Arab Bank, agrees. “Before, we had a list of global projects, so we could identify duplication of effort to some extent. But in terms of resource allocation and taking a strategic view of where our projects were taking us, it was difficult.”......