"Compliance activities are done in Clarity workflow that cover legal, disability, usability," Smart said. "Even lawyers do their approvals online."

The EPM framework is also "financially enabled" so every dollar of Capex and Project expenditure can be seen.

"The financial part of clarity is a big thing for us," Smart said. "We have had to do a fair bit of building around this. We plan at the project level, approve those, and we track dollars in the SAP financial and HR core."

The other big for Telstra is how it manages marketing and the "go to market" process.

Anything that touches the customers like online, TV, print, telemarketing, mailing lists, has to go through the same approval process as IT projects.

"It was a challenge to get marketing people to view campaigns as projects," Smart said. "We added extra activities in the marketing workflow as price plans are very complex and we also built in advertising copy approval. The users are non-project managers in marketing and Clarity doesn't seem too project 'managy' and we actally had a better deployment in marketing, so we are learning."

Looking back over Telstra's whirlwind 18 months, Smart said it learned a lot about implementing Clarity, stakeholder management and the right level of management in decision making.

It is now using the application completely for its 2008-2009 planning phase.

"Clarity is very configurable and some applications Telstra has purchased as part of the transformation project are not," Smart said, adding there is a paradox between configurability and complexity and prototyping is critical to getting users involved.

As for the desktop application users, Clarity is integrated with Microsoft Project so all core project information is reported through Clarity.

Smart said Excel is "another challenge" as planning has always been run with spreadsheets.

"We now use Clarity as single source of truth as finance is starting to understand the data more," she said.