Bonneville Power Administration

Created a total project management system upgrade to improve enterprise reporting, resource planning and project tracking.

The Client

Bonneville Power Administration (BPA) is a federal agency headquartered in Portland, OR., that markets wholesale electricity and transmission to the Pacific Northwest's public and private utilities, as well as to some large industries. BPA provides about half the electricity used in the Northwest and operates over three-fourths of the region's high-voltage transmission.

The Challenge

While BPA is part of the Department of Energy, it is not tax-supported through government appropriations. Instead, BPA recovers all of its expenses through sales of electricity and transmission services and repays the U.S. Treasury for borrowed capital funding in full with interest. The BPA initiates approximately 750 capital projects a year with a budget of $200–300 million. Consequently, the BPA needs to provide mandatory reports to Congress and to the OMB on its capital projects and budgets. These reports are crucial in assuring key projects are properly funded to maintain the continuity and reliability of power in the Northwest.

However, the BPA uses Passport as a work management system and PeopleSoft as a financial system. Both lack the comprehensive enterprise reporting, project monitoring and tracking needed. Specifically:

• Limited ability in reporting and forecasting of cost and resources, hampering the agency's ability to effectively and accurately support those reporting requirements
• Difficulty in gathering the information necessary for managers and executives to make effective business decisions

Other key challenges included:

• Updates made by project and program managers are cumbersome and are time consuming in the enterprise systems
• Project managers have to navigate through a multitude of screens in order to update even simple projects

The Pcubed Solution

BPA commissioned Pcubed to build a link between its work management and financial systems with Microsoft Project 2002. A dynamic two-way interface was created to download 2,500 work orders including work order, task, schedule and resource data from Passport while it downloaded actual and estimated costs, actual and estimated labor hours and enterprise projects from PeopleSoft. This data was then loaded into a Microsoft Project 2002 database, and could be accessed by project managers to view and manage their project schedules, budgets, and resources.

This solution also allowed project managers to add to their existing tasks resulting in more detailed project planning, control and tracking, while offering:

• A significant improvement in reporting and project monitoring
• Improved costs forecasting reports required to meet the mandated requirements of Congress
• Project managers the ability to update their project schedules much more easily and quickly

Key elements of the solution included:

• Access to advanced features that will enhance collaboration
• Improvement to overall communication and visibility within the BPA
• Reduction of intra-project and inter-project dependency
• Customized views of project and budgets
• The avoidance of bottlenecks in current planning
• The ability to provide the project teams and senior executives with improved capacity to plan for future work requirements