Boston College, a private Jesuit Catholic research university located six miles west of downtown Boston, has been using a PPM approach to project management and delivery. Within the organization, PPM supports three key functions:
- Proposal Management: PPM provides the ability to analyze proposed projects to determine their requirements and look at if/when adequate resources will be available. This paints a picture of where resources are allocated and for how long, allowing teams to build plans backed by data and recognize bottlenecks before they happen.
- Ongoing Project Management: Once a project is approved with an established timeline, continued management is essential to staying on track. With PPM, there is clear visibility into individual projects and groups of projects including scheduling, resource assignment, and reporting.
- Managing Non-Project Work: Having a pulse on resource commitment levels helps ensure that work unrelated to or outside the scope of a project does not threaten milestones and timelines.
“The ability to have a single repository or system where you can plan, track and manage the entire portfolio of work is really very valuable,” said Denis Walsh, Director of Project Planning and Portfolio Governance at Boston College.
If you’re considering a PPM solution, Walsh recommends you make sure the platform you select is flexible. Flexibility in the configuration of the product provides a solid foundation to build out your specific implementation.
Using TeamDynamix for PPM has given Boston College the ability to have a complete picture of what their resources are scheduled for, “[Being able to] plan that out six, eight, nine months or more into the future is one of the key areas the tool has made a difference,” said Walsh. “It has helped us with resource capacity planning. We use the capacity planner to look at what’s being introduced or being requested, and to make sure that we see and identify any resource constraints or bottlenecks before they actually happen.”
At Kern Family Health Care, a Medi-Cal managed care health plan serving residents of Kern County, California, they are also using TeamDynamix PPM to manage projects. Prior to TeamDynamix, LaVonne Banks, director of Kern Health Systems’ enterprise project management office (EPMO), said department heads would describe their project requests using a Word document and submit this form to Banks’ office by email. EPMO staff would maintain a shared spreadsheet with information about projects that were proposed, approved, and underway.
However, this process was inefficient, and project managers did not have easy visibility into the status of projects.
Now, EPMO staff leverage TeamDynamix to manage the project requests and intake process.
With a simple and intuitive user interface, TeamDynamix makes it easy for project managers to evaluate project requests, approve and prioritize initiatives, assign resources and track and report on progress. TeamDynamix helps EPMO staff keep projects on course, establish clear expectations, and allocate resources more effectively.
“With TeamDynamix, I always have a source of truth on project data,” Banks said. And better transparency leads to more accountability and, ultimately, a higher project success rate.
When you consider that project portfolio management tools can cost several times as much for similar features and functionality, “the value of TeamDynamix is incomparable,” Banks concludes.