Smart Systems for Health Agency (SSHA)

The development and implementation of a project management system that identifies, rationalizes, prioritizes and approves yearly projects.

The Client

Smart Systems for Health Agency of Ontario (SSHA) is a publicly funded Ontario Government Agency associated with the Ministry of Health and Long Term Care (MOHLTC). SSHA provides a secure, fully managed, private and province-wide information technology infrastructure which allows electronic communications among Ontario's healthcare service providers. SSHA also provides physical data centre facilities for hosting medical applications and patient databases and provides 24/7 support for its users. SSHA's clients consist of agencies and organizations within the healthcare industry.

The Challenge

The Agency, like all public sector organizations, receives fixed annual budget allocations and their list of projects often exceeds available funding. SSHA has had challenges consistently delivering on its project commitments and this affected the Agency's credibility with the Ministry of Health. An independent review of the Agency's operations in 2006, known as the Operational Review, found that SSHA lacked basic information on the projects within its portfolio, their status, and expected deliverables. The Operational Review Board recommended the Agency:

• Identify its projects and their delivery issues
• Prioritize and rationalize the portfolio
• Confirm that its projects were aligned with the Agency's commitments and strategies

Other key challenges included:

• Lack of a centralized project management office to inventory, track and monitor the Agency's projects
• Immediate set of short-term recommendations that would be reviewed by the Ontario Auditor General as part of its annual audit
• A review of the Agency's progress on the Project Management related recommendations
• Rationalization and prioritization of the Agency's portfolio of projects

The Pcubed Solution

To address the problem Pcubed proposed a 3-part solution:

1. Conduct a Project Management Baseline Assessment. The PMBA confirmed the state of Project Management in SSHA. The key finding was the lack of accountability for projects within the Agency. To address the need to identify the Agency's project portfolio, Pcubed worked with the newly formed Agency Project Office (APO). The APO and Pcubed team worked with the Agency's functional divisions to identify and inventory their projects in a consolidated Project Registry database. Pcubed worked with the APO and the executive team to develop a project rationalization and prioritization approach that established the approved project list for the Agency. Pcubed then worked with the APO, the Finance Organization and the executive team to develop guidelines, a project rationalization and a prioritization approach that established the approved project list for the Agency
2. Establish a link between the approved project list and the Agency's project information systems. These included Microsoft Project Server (MSPS) and Microsoft SharePoint Services. Pcubed worked with the PM Community to identify the relevant project schedules within MSPS and related information repositories and SharePoint document sites. The Pcubed team then developed reporting tools to monitor the quality of Microsoft Project schedules. Additional reports were developed to measure the overall quality of the MSPS environment. The Pcubed team continued work with the Finance organization to implement Project Accounting integrating MSPS and the Agency's accounting system, Great Plains. They further assisted the Agency with its in-year re-forecasting processes. During this phase, Pcubed identified the lack of consistent project information within Microsoft Project Server, which resulted in a third phase of work
3. Correct the lack of visibility into the Agency's portfolio of projects. To avoid inconsistent current data surrounding the approved projects, action plans were created to update project information to improve the project schedule information. Pcubed developed standards for evaluating project schedule quality, and identified a set of actions to drive consistency in them. In addition, a consolidated project staffing solution provided weekly resource supply and demand information to project managers for more effective resource management

Key elements of the solution included:

• The establishment of programs to fully identify, rationalize and prioritize projects
• A process for approving projects was developed and implemented
• Projects were priced using consistent guidelines and budgets were applied down to the project level
• Visibility into the Agency's portfolio of projects was greatly improved
• The project information systems MSPS and SharePoint knowledge repositories were all linked together
• Greater transparency in the projects was obtained as a result of the tracking of projects as a portfolio