AmSurg standardizes project management processes with SharePoint templates

AmSurg needed a system to manage and track multiple medium-to-large projects at once. The projects often dealt with almost every department in the organization and many required rollout to more than 200 AmSurg surgery centers. There were also growing requests from senior management for the status of various “programs” and projects. AmSurg needed a way to track and manage the projects and programs they were undertaking, but the problem was that there was little organizational project management knowledge and few formal project management processes and policies. Also, whatever solution AmSurg chose had to leverage SharePoint, which was already in use throughout the organization.

AmSurg evaluated several project management solutions, but settled on BrightWork for a number of reasons. They liked that BrightWork had:

• multiple pre-defined templates for not only small and medium projects, but large projects as well
• the ability to modify the templates for their needs to create a customized project site template
• BrightWork worked on top of SharePoint which allowed AmSurg to leverage their technology investment.

AmSurg has utilized what comes out of the box and modified it to make BrightWork work for them. One way they did this, for example, was by customizing the form in the Project Issues list. Out of the box, the issue form that comes with BrightWork has several detailed fields that make perfect sense in terms of project management, but AmSurg did not need most of the fields and many users in the organization were actually confused by them.

Easily, AmSurg was able to hide those fields and shorten the form to only the fields they needed. After customizing the Issues list, they went on to customize a BrightWork template that fits the way they manage projects. Now they can create a project site with the exact amount of management they want using their customized BrightWork template. They use BrightWork to store all project related work, such as project goals, documents, issues, project plans all in one place.

Senior management uses the built in dashboard reporting to easily roll up data for whatever projects they want to track.

Project team members can go into the individual project sites and enter the detail, which all rolls up to the portfolio dashboard. The portfolio view allows managers to see all active projects and their statuses without having to navigate through the SharePoint environment to find them. The site is customized to show only the crucial data they need to track.

BrightWork also enables AmSurg to print or email reports to senior management, allowing them to view reports and take action without actually having to log in to SharePoint to view it.