Challenge:
At Nottingham Trent, IS Project Managers are responsible not just for technology related projects but also for web and Business change management initiatives, so their remit is fairly broad within the University operation.
Before engaging Program Framework they had multiple approaches to project reporting, with Project Managers monitoring, controlling and reporting slightly differently. Although they had the concept of gated processes within a project framework, its use was inconsistent. This resulted in a lot of difficulty getting to a single version of the truth – even down to articulating project end dates!
With no Quality Assurance, standards or core documentation there was very little control, coherence or visibility of resource demand across the IS project function. There was no single resource planning product, with some people using spreadsheets and others using notebooks. As a result there was little cross-project visibility of resource demand.
Our Microsoft PPM Solution:
Within three months of Program Framework’s engagement NTU went live to the Project Managers with the basic functionality of Microsoft Project Online, including generic plans, milestones, project documentation and automated status reports.
They then began to build on the solution to include Resource Management and increasing reporting capability through dashboards and real-time reporting.
Program Framework's Project Status Report add-in was deployed to deliver consistent status reporting, avoiding double entry of data and instant governance by the PMO.
Benefits:
The benefits of the solution are transformative: Consistency of process, time saved through efficient reporting, much greater stakeholder engagement through increased visibility of portfolio information, increased resource utilisation and project success.
"We now have a resource centre view we could not have even dreamed of before – by project, period, duration, team, and availability. On receiving resource requests Resource Owners only have to look at an automatically generated graph in Microsoft Project Online in order to make a decision."
"We have been congratulated by senior stakeholders on the maturity of our reporting capabilities."
Chris Ward, Head of PMO, Nottingham Trent University
