Broward County Public Schools

Created a state-of-the-art management system that upgraded the leadership and educational programs in the public school district.

The Client

Broward County Public Schools (BCPS) is the nation's sixth largest school district and one of the fastest growing districts in the nation. With over 271,000 students and over U.S. $60 million in outlays for IT projects across the district, the technology infrastructure of BCPS rivals that of Fortune 1000 companies.

The Challenge

The district's project management processes had evolved as new technologies and were adopted as the district tried to meet the changing technology needs of individual schools. The result was an inconsistent and often uncoordinated deployment of resources that failed to address technology needs fairly and cost effectively. In recent years, the BCPS IT department manually managed over 78 IT projects with timelines that extended anywhere from 6 months to 5 years and accumulated over $60 million in capital outlays. Inefficiencies associated with manual project management have affected the ability of the IT organization to address the district's technology needs in a cost-effective fashion. This in turn has led to complications in securing additional funding. A stateof- the-art project management system was needed to help save time, money, and establish a uniform process.

Other key challenges included:

• The tracking of IT projects and prioritizing the needs against available financial, human and technical resources
• Realistic forecasting of schedules and budgets and the coordination of purpose and implementation between themselves and other projects
• More accountable to students, parents and teachers regarding what technology should deliver
• Improvements on how IT initiatives are conceived, planned, resourced and implemented

The Pcubed Solution

In an effort to address industry best practices and standards across the school district, Pcubed worked in conjunction with executives from Microsoft Services to recommend a state-of-the-art solution for developing an Enterprise Project Management (EPM) system. Dell Services, which was managing the hardware component of the project, also provided support in optimizing an SQL clustering solution for this project. The combination of technologies from Microsoft and Dell, with Pcubed's extensive experience deploying EPM software, brought the district the best solution with the most value in the shortest timeframe. Specifically, Broward County Public Schools deployed:

• Project management software that provides centralization and standardization of project and resource information to enable enterprise resource management, web-based time and status reporting, web-based views of portfolio and project performance and data portfolio analysis and modeling, and integration with other line-of-business (LOB) systems
• Tools to align IT investments with business objectives, plus ways to improve performance and quality management capabilities like planning and scheduling capabilities, enterprise templates, skills-based resource assignment, and resource availability views
• Operating system that provide team services and websites for information sharing and document collaboration. Windows SharePoint Services enables issue tracking, risk management, and document management, including check-in/check-out and version control features
• Data management software for more accurate business intelligence and analysis services including data warehousing; and relational database engine, data mining and rich data analysis, and support for web-based queries

Key elements of the solution included:

• Improved standards and communication on project status ensuring consistency and quality control
• The ability to manage projects as a collective portfolio without effecting timelines
• The development of a strategy for automating the entire lifecycle of technology initiatives - from conceptualization to deployment