Success Stories

Frontier Airlines Flies Steady with Daptiv PPM

Frontier Airlines, based in Denver, Colorado, began service in 1994 with 180 employees and two Boeing 737-200s. Today, Frontier is the second largest carrier out of Denver International Airport, with an average of 350 daily system-wide departures and arrivals. Throughout North and Central America, Frontier now employs approximately 6,000 employees, with flights in the U.S. and Mexico, Canada and Costa Rica.

Business Issues

Within Frontier’s IT Department, there are approximately 100 full-time employees that manage the network, servers, applications, airport support and help desk activities. Life in Frontier’s IT world has been strongly activity and task-based, initiatives driven by operating departments such as Finance, HR, Audit, Flight Operations, Station Operations, Marketing, Maintenance & Engineering and Inflight Services.

Concern arose within Frontier that IT performance was affecting business:
• Unclear and shifting priorities
• Many complex system interdependencies
• High uptime expectations
• Work demand far exceeded capacity

Disorder was created due to a lack of accountability, visibility, transparency, structure and resource balance.

Frontier’s business problem: Fragmentation due to a number of uncoordinated business processes. There was also a concern regarding resources and if the right projects were being prioritized.

Frontier’s IT problem: Lack of visibility into what other business units were working on, including issues affecting them. This created a resource allocation problem. IT was working hard but not delivering on the most important projects.

Business Solution

Frontier’s solution included altering their processes, technology and personnel. The PMO office would take the lead in providing the needed structure to standardize project management processes and facilitate IT project portfolio management. In order to facilitate this plan, there needed to be executive management participation and commitment to the strategy, in addition to transparency, accountability, and increased communication.
The forefront of Frontier’s plan to improve business processes was to identify a tool to facilitate a single source of truth on all project data, providing visibility, traceability and accountability across functions and roles.

Selection Process

The Frontier managers, including development, strategy, solutions, and project managers were involved with the selection of a PPM/PMO tool. After a period of self-education, the managers looked into Gartner’s Magic Quadrant for IT Project and Portfolio Management Application. Frontier sent requests for additional information to 40 companies, ultimately narrowed down their evaluation to Planview, HP, CA, Primavera, Compuware, dotProject and Daptiv. To help with the evaluation of the seven different project and collaboration vendors, Frontier hired a consultant.

Frontier’s selection included an evaluation of product, company personality, pricing and demonstrations. Frontier started out with 80 different questions, and then narrowed it to 22 questions centered on graphics presentation, roles and permissions, visibility and online help. A matrix was used to score each vendor during presentations to further vet down the top contenders, analyzing different attributes related to capacity management, portfolio management, project management and general usability.

Why Daptiv

“We chose Daptiv for three main reasons: cost, implementation speed and functionality. We wanted a vendor that cared, that responded well to our needs in a timely fashion, and had the technical fit we desired – and that was Daptiv,” says Tom Hortman, Manager, Program Management Office. Frontier also liked the fact that Daptiv was a SaaS (Software as a Service) vendor. “In a cost projection and per-seat analysis, SaaS worked very well for us. It was the sweet spot of cost and functionally in the end,” says Hortman.

Daptiv PPM Functionality Used by Frontier

Executive Committee – Daptiv PPM is used on a weekly basis for reporting purposes to monitor high priority in progress projects. “Daptiv PPM provided a big win when it comes to reporting. Before we could spend 4-8 hours a week on reporting, now we can get a better result in 1-2 hours,” says Hortman.

Project Managers—Daptiv PPM’s tasks and time sheet functionality are used
to manage approximately 10,000 actual hours of effort per month, applied to different tasks!

Individual Managers – Daptiv PPM’s resource management is used by individual managers such as the Development, Business Solutions, and Application Support managers. In addition, Daptiv’s capacity planner is being explored.

The overall benefit of using a tool like Daptiv PPM boils down to visibility, time-savings and having a single source of truth. “We now have the much needed overall visibility into projects and portfolios. Daptiv portfolio data was crucial during our last budget cycle. Data collection takes less than half the time while producing a better result. Now that there is a single version of the truth, we are better able to prioritize required management decisions,” says Hortman.