The Fennia Group is a leading expert of insurance and insurance-related services. Fennia offers companies, entrepreneurs and private clients risk management, insurance and asset management services.

The Fennia Group comprises three companies: the casualty insurance company Fennia, Fennia Life, which offers voluntary life, pension and deposit insurance products and Fennia Asset Management Ltd., which provides asset management services.

Thinking Portfolio’s new features made the difference

Fennia’s portfolio of in-house development projects features currently around 50 projects at various stages of their life cycles, from preparation to follow-up evaluation.

Previously the company had used another project portfolio management tool, but since the spring of 2015, Thinking Portfolio has been their tool of choice.

For Fennia one of the key requirements, in addition to the standard project portfolio features, was that the application had functions for managing individual projects in order to ease the workflow of project managers.

“We had followed the development of various tools and explored all of our options for several years. We had gotten to know Thinking Portfolio before, but at the time it was not developed enough for our expectation.

During the last fall’s Administrator event, we saw the presentation of another company using Thinking Portfolio, and we discovered that the application had developed the functionalities we were looking for.”

Add to that the good benefit-cost ratio, and Thinking Portfolio became the obvious choice as Fennia’s new project portfolio management and monitoring tool.

Good project results were key

IPMA Level A Certified Projects Director Anne Isotalo says that overall, the Thinking Portfolio implementation project has gone well.

“The definition workshops were productive, although the documentation presented challenges.

The definition documentation finalization rounds took slightly longer than anticipated, but we felt that the optimal, finalized solution was more important than sticking to a strict implementation deadline.

We were able to verify the accuracy of the implementation during the pilot stage. Fine tuning the application was done smoothly and quickly.”

Thinking Portfolio is making everyday life easier for the project manager and the department

According to Anne Isotalo, the decision to change applications has proven to be the correct one. She lists feedback received from project managers during the first six months of using Thinking Portfolio. The feedback has been very positive; the project managers have found that Thinking Portfolio is genuinely helpful in everyday work.

“Thinking Portfolio is really easy to use, and everyone can pick it up quickly without separate training and guidelines.

We have been able to stop using different types of PowerPoint and Word documents, as all data is integrated in Thinking Portfolio.

The project managers felt that with the old application they had to do extra work for the project department. The new application has been actually beneficial for managing their own projects.”

From Isotalo’s perspective, the most advantageous innovation has been Thinking Portfolio’s summaries and reports. As an example she mentions the status report feature, that can provide information to several different target groups.

She also says that post-implementation collaboration with the supplier has been effortless and smooth.

“At the moment, most of our additional feature orders have been focused on reports. The additional work has been performed quickly and within a reasonable budget.

We have not received much support with the application itself, but any user rights queries we have made have been addressed quickly.”

Thinking Portfolio is making work smoother

“Isotalo finds Thinking Portfolio to be an excellent project and project portfolio management tool for their organization. The tool is versatile, user-friendly, and does not take away extra time from the actual work of project managers,” she summarizes.

Contact information:

Anne Isotalo
IPMA Level A Certified Projects Director
Fennia Group