Challenge

Our client’s Communication department managed a large portfolio of projects, reporting many different data points within each project. Tracking and reporting was largely manual, and data points were not consistent from project to project. Information was tracked in many different locations including project specific sites. Not every project had its own site location.

Both team members and organization leadership wanted a single tool for capturing project information, and to reduce the need for individual project managers to produce manual reports.

Plaster Group’s Enterprise Software Team was asked to build a centralized project portfolio management hub that would list projects, resources, budget, and high-level milestones and combine this data to provide management with a thorough project status. In addition, consultants would need to produce sub-sites to manage the same data at a team and project level, and implement tools capable of ad-hoc reporting.

Approach

Plaster Group worked closely with the customer’s stakeholders to develop and implement a single project portfolio management SharePoint site. As this site would provide one list to capture all required data points for the entire project portfolio, thorough business analysis was essential.

Consultants worked simultaneously with business leadership and individual project teams to standardize data points and data fields, ensuring consistency across teams. Special care was given to ensure data points being captured met the reporting needs of management.

Solution

In addition to a central hub, Plaster Group consultants created multiple custom site pages to present data in customizable views. These team and management tailored sites allow our client to address varying business collaboration, communication and reporting needs such as balancing budgets and resources or managing resource constraints and project milestones. Key features include:

• Data for all projects collected through single, consistent SharePoint interface
• SharePoint list delivers a clear visual picture of the project portfolio at different levels and from different perspectives to meet the needs of any individual stakeholder
• SharePoint sites combine seamlessly with Tableau for customizable reports and dashboards that are easily created from the single storage and tracking location
• Back-end structure has been easily applied to other departments across the enterprise for department specific applications

Results

Our client’s business users now have one SharePoint location with easily located pages, and views to the desired dashboard and reports from one list. In addition:

• Custom solution used existing tools and infrastructure without needing to buy and use third party reporting tools
• Similar solutions were deployed for other customer teams, contributing to consistent look and feel across the enterprise