Consumer tech company raises project visibility, streamlines operations, and eliminates backlog

This consumer technology company creates market-leading products with inspiring workplaces around the globe. However, a lack of CRE project governance inhibited agility and increased costs.

JLL Technologies helped them:

• Design and implement a global CRE technology project management office (PMO) that aligns with the company’s goals.
• Lead change management to ensure employees adopt project governance and lifecycle management.
• Eliminate an eight-month backlog with better project portfolio visibility.
• Deliver consistent and accurate space occupancy and utilization reporting with Archibus system performance tuning and data governance.
• Achieve 50-60% time savings by automating manual technology testing processes.
• Build a CRE technology roadmap that provides the foundation for ongoing innovation.

This highly innovative tech company has a proven track record of providing compelling consumer products and services around the globe. Its rapid growth created a significant corporate real estate (CRE) footprint with dynamic and engaging workspaces. However, the company needed to establish a consistent operating model to execute strategic CRE technology projects in multiple functional areas globally, including space management, facilities, security, and culinary operations.

The lack of visibility across the company led to individual business units executing CRE projects without consistent processes, governance, or reporting, resulting in an ad-hoc project management approach. There was no prioritization or global standards (e.g., documentation), so projects were frequently delayed or incomplete. This disjointed approach compromised the company’s ability to get valuable insights into the health and status of its CRE portfolio.

Although the company had worked with a standard IT provider for project management to establish control over its CRE projects, it was not a successful solution. While technically proficient, the IT provider’s lack of CRE expertise led to costly project delays and failures.

Following a thorough vetting process, the company selected JLL Technologies (JLLT) as its new service provider. By turning to JLLT, the company can rely on a partner with substantial expertise in both technology and CRE. JLLT has extensive CRE business process experience and a history of managing hundreds of CRE technology projects for some of the world’s largest organizations.

Serving as part of the company’s Facilities, Culinary, and Security (FCS) Tech Program Management team, JLLT offers significant domain knowledge and technology project management experience. JLLT helps the team be more efficient and effective in its future planning and CRE tech roadmap development. In addition to upleveling its project management capabilities, the new team also acts as internal business consultants to help the company clearly define problem spaces, determine impact and justification for investments, and identify technology priorities to deliver greater impact across FCS.

JLLT helped the company establish a Project Management Office (PMO) to govern and manage all inbound and inflight CRE technology projects. To ensure projects would align with the company’s strategic goals, JLLT led North Star workshops (part of a JLLT Strategic Technology Program) to help the company define and develop CRE goals and guiding principles before starting the project. These principles provide critical guidance for project evaluation and inflight project management.

Change management capabilities—including processes, communications, trainings, documentation, and pulse surveys—help ensure employees embrace the latest updates and innovations, allowing the company to achieve more with its CRE tech program. Automating formerly manual testing resulted in increased efficiency and 50–60% time savings from inception to completion.

JLLT experts also helped modernize and tune the company’s Archibus IWMS solution, providing better data management processes for global space management. Now, the company can confidently rely on the system’s space occupancy and utilization reports, improving the quality and timeliness of its decision-making.

By implementing a CRE tech-focused PMO with operational excellence and governance, the company eliminated an eightmonth project backlog and is back on track with a long-term, sustainable solution. This includes more visibility and agility to ensure its projects and spaces effectively support and inspire its global, hybrid workforce.