Schneider Electric Support Their Project Methodology with BrightWork

Schneider Electric’s business unit had previously deployed an excel based project management template to assist project managers in managing customer facing projects. Updates, changes, corrections and ongoing improvements were very difficult to distribute and manage across our 35+ project management staff. Challenges with different versions of excel, macro security etc.. created excessive support time.

In addition, they had a legacy version of MS Project Server 2003 and were well past due to upgrade to a newer version of MS Project to take advantage of the improvements in the MS Project desktop application. They did not use most of the advanced features of MS Project Server and had decided not to upgrade to a newer version due to costs, leaving a gap for how to manage project schedules in a collaborative IT environment.

Finally, the PMO staff is geographically dispersed across the USA and collaborating on project schedules and project management plan documents was difficult.

Schneider Electric started on a SharePoint 2010 solution with BrightWork V10 and Project Office Jump Start with software assurance. They worked closely with a BrightWork consultant to assist in their pilot deployment to make the necessary modifications to build customized templates that use the company’s project management methodology. They leveraged the software assurance agreement with each successive version upgrade and recently deployed SharePoint 2013 with BrightWork version 15 to leverage the improved MS Project Synchronization with MS Project 2013. Schneider now has 100 users with approximately 35 Project Managers, 15 managers and 50 additional project resources accessing the system to deploy customer facing projects.

They are currently using the Project Structured template within Project Offices that align with the staffing and management structure. In addition, they are leveraging portfolios to analyze and manage a handful of portfolios.

Some of Schneider Electric’s benefits from the BrightWork solution include:

• Improved project visibility and collaboration in an IT structure that can easily manage and customize with internal resources.
• As project managers update their project management plan all the necessary reporting, metrics and related data are available immediately to project resources and management to ensure projects stay on track.
• Reduced burden on email for communications and improved the consumption of data by different types of roles – Engineering, Management, Field Commissioning resources.

In addition, they have customized the solution leveraging their Customer Project Process (CPP). This is Schneider Electric’s project management methodology based on company recognized best practices, and have fully leveraged 6 project metrics that support our methodology.

As their business needs change, new reports and changes to our project templates can be internally developed in a short period of time and the PMO consistently leverages the design sync feature which allows them to synchronize these improvements to existing projects in a controlled manner.

Finally, Schneider Electric continues to leverage their BrightWork consultant periodically for guidance on new reporting requirements and other questions. He provides “just enough” assistance to ensure their development continues on the right path so they can continue to leverage new features in future releases.