Prominent Religious Institute

Using a project management tool to make an enterprise application deployment successful.

The Client

The Client is a prominent religious institute and international publisher of five periodicals and the recipient of seven Pulitzer Prizes in journalism. The Client has members in 130 different countries and more than 2,000 connected branches and societies that reach out through print, web-based newspapers, radio, and television.

The Challenge

The Client needed a business solution to manage the implementation of a global accounting network based on Oracle to track subscriptions and deliveries of periodicals to its millions of subscribers. The Client needed their multi-million dollar project to be their most successful, organized, and profitable engagement, and serve as the new standard for their Project Management Office (PMO). The critical success factors were:

• Establish a unilateral system for project managers, stakeholders, and contractors to get a view across all projects
• Create a uniform project control and reporting system
• Institute a standard for communication and document sharing between PMO members and project managers

The Pcubed Solution

Pcubed conducted various assessments to understand the current environment and determined what course of action should be taken to deliver upon all critical success factors. Pcubed created a road map and initiated an Enterprise Project Management (EPM) pilot, establishing a benchmark for better project management practices, which were then applied to the Oracle project:

• Delivered an operational model including processes to manage risks, issues, change requests, status reports, documents, inter-project dependencies, resource supply and demand, as well as costs
• Created and delivered training workshops for project managers, business analysts, and PMO members
• Migrated data from Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 to 2007

The Results

Using the Microsoft EPM Solution, Pcubed addressed the Client's needs to manage the accounting system deployment. The PMO now has a tool to support the deployment, but also a standard tool with tailor made project management process that allows the Client to have visibility, insight, and control across all projects of the organization.