The County of Wellington IT Department wanted to establish a project management framework and get greater visibility into project statuses, improve project tracking and enhance collaboration for better overall project performance. As they lacked a formal project management framework, the department also needed to instil project management as a process, as well as deploy a flexible tool that could evolve with their level of project management maturity.

With this need for varying levels of project management, the BrightWork ‘Start | Evolve’ template-based approach was recognized as a good fit for the County.

The IT Department at the County initially deployed in the cloud with BrightWork Online. Their environment is comprised of three tiers, in which work and projects are managed at the project level, which in turn roll up to their respective Application Services and Technology Services portfolios, each of which rolls up the to the IT PMO Office.

Deploying BrightWork enabled the County of Wellington IT department to increase their project management maturity relatively quickly. The department improved visibility at the task level, including task status and who it was assigned to. They can also get at-a-glance views across all projects, making it easy for senior managers to track status reports week to week.

The visibility into the status of delays gives them a much greater understanding of the impact a delayed project has on the overall portfolio. “The ability to track status reports week to week, especially as projects get distracted or deferred, was huge for us,” says Doug Waram, Supervisor of Application Services at County of Wellington.

The ease of use of the tool has meant less effort overall to get things done. In terms of project reporting, status reports for each project can be created in a matter of minutes, versus a couple of hours using the previous approach. For portfolio reporting, reporting takes about half an hour versus a day.

Now that they have implemented a project management methodology that is supported with a tool, the County is interested in “evolving” their project management to use the new Project Request Manager template to manage their project intake process.

“It’s a great example of the BrightWork Start | Evolve philosophy in practice,” says Doug. “We were able to put a project management framework in place, so we are not only managing projects the right way, but making sure that we are working on the right projects.”

Key Takeaways

• BrightWork enabled the County to establish a project management framework
• The BrightWork Start | Evolve approach allowed the County to “right size” project management to fit their level of maturity.
• The County was able to cut down significantly on the time it takes to create project status reports.