Reaching New Heights

Eliminating Silos 

Florida Southwestern State’s experience with TeamDynamix actually began with the Project Portfolio Management (PPM) module in 2018, before the college added the IT Service Management component the following year. 

Before acquiring TeamDynamix, “we were not very efficient at completing projects,” Dudley admits. “We approached them with more of a firefighting mentality. Whatever projects we heard the most complaints about would be the ones we would focus on.” 

Each department within IT managed its own projects via spreadsheets, and there wasn’t much communication between departments. “The group responsible for managing the college’s ERP system might have been waiting on the programming group to do something, but the programming group might have had a backlog of projects,” Dudley explains. “There were a lot of silos in IT. No one really knew who was working on what.” 

This made effective resource allocation very difficult. “We weren’t maximizing resources within IT to make sure we were meeting the needs of the college,” Dudley says. Dudley tried a few other web-based project management tools but found they were lacking. “They were geared more toward businesses, and they didn’t give us the flexibility to establish the workflows and approvals we needed for a higher-education environment,” he says. 

When he heard about TeamDynamix from a colleague at another Florida college, he realized it was just the solution he’d been looking for. 

Full Transparency 

With the TeamDynamix ITSM and PPM single platform approach, Dudley and his staff have full visibility into all project work as well as tickets, incidents, and problems. All work can be viewed in one place and resources allocation across this work is in one place. In his words, IT projects no longer disappear into a “black hole”; instead, there is full transparency. 

College personnel can submit project requests through the TeamDynamix client portal. Dudley and his staff have created a scoring system within the platform that helps college leaders understand how mission-critical a project is. This gives them a formal project intake framework that can be leveraged in high-level stakeholder discussions. 

“I meet with the other vice presidents on-campus quarterly,” he says. “I provide them with the list of projects that have been submitted through TeamDynamix, along with a scorecard for these projects and we use this scorecard as one of the driving factors in making decisions as a team about which projects we should move forward on and in what order of priority.” 

Since implementing TeamDynamix, “we’ve become much more efficient at completing projects,” Dudley notes. “Our project completion time has stayed consistent; however, we’re now able to complete twice as many projects in the same time frame. In our most recent analysis, we showed a 60-percent increase in the number of projects we completed over a six-month period.” 

One reason for this increased efficiency is that Dudley and his colleagues can allocate IT resources more strategically. “Now, we can see who’s working on what,” he says. “When we get a new project request, we can allocate resources that might be idle to get that project moving.”