As an educational service provider, CREC prides itself on quickly responding to the needs of its customers. At the same time, the agency needs to remain focused on its annual and long-term strategic initiatives. To manage short- and long-term initiatives, the agency needed a single place to monitor the status of all projects and their associated timelines, resources, risks, and other project-related information.

The solution CREC needed came about from several basic needs:

• Give the organization’s leadership a clear view of where technology resources were allocated and how the technology group serves the organization
• Allow for tiered access, whereby external stakeholders and sponsors could track progress without having to sift through the weeds of project activity
• Provide a single place for all team members in the Technology Department to work, collaborate, and track progress against goals
• Reinforce best practices in project management, based on the PMI standards

CREC had invested significant resources into SharePoint, which led to the need to leverage that platform to manage projects. With those objectives in mind, BrightWork became the clear choice for a project management information system.

Even though CREC has just recently deployed BrightWork, its technology group is already experiencing benefits from the solution. Some of the highlights include:

• A single point of reference where CREC can track all of its technology initiatives
• Powerful version control and collaboration tools to maintain core project documents
• Dashboard and toolset to prevent over-allocation of staff and reinforce agency priorities