Outgrowing SharePoint as a Stand-Alone Project Management Tool

Moving to a “One Triumph” Culture

In 2016 Triumph Group embarked on a company-wide transformation to better adapt and succeed in today’s ever-changing, global marketplace. In addition to many operations and financial focused initiatives, the company implemented a new matrix organization structure, which involved the centralizing of functional processes and systems. For IT, it had a tremendous impact on project management. Historically, each Triumph operating site ran its own projects, which led to little visibility at the enterprise level. Due to the lack of a project management framework, Triumph was also suffering from projects missing deadlines, going over budget, or simply never ending.

Outgrowing SharePoint as a Stand-Alone Project Management Tool

When Melissa Scheppele joined Triumph Group as Chief Information Officer and VP of IT in May 2016, one of her first accomplishments was setting up an IT Project Management Office (PMO). Initially this PMO used an on-premise SharePoint 2010 environment to capture different projects underway, providing a better understanding of the portfolio of projects.

The PMO soon outgrew SharePoint as a stand-alone project management tool and decided to take the next step and look for a more capable solution.

The PMO first looked internally to see what other groups at Triumph were using for their project management needs. They began to evaluate these tools for the wider business by building proof-of-concepts. However, around the same time Triumph Group welcomed Dennis Conley as Senior Manager of the Enterprise Applications Program Office. Dennis had prior experience using BrightWork as a project management tool and so BrightWork was added to the evaluation mix.

By comparing BrightWork with the other tools, the PMO could see that BrightWork led in terms of integration needs and project automation. The winning factor was that BrightWork is built on SharePoint and the user experience is very similar to the SharePoint environment the team had already grown used to.

9 Projects Completed Using BrightWork and 117+ Projects Underway

Upon purchasing BrightWork, Triumph Group was assigned a BrightWork Customer Success Architect to facilitate the implementation process.

Triumph uses mostly out-of-the-box BrightWork functionality for their on-premise SharePoint 2016 environment. As the look and feel is so like SharePoint, Triumph can utilize their internal SharePoint team to assist with some areas of support. This removes reliance on BrightWork for all support needs.

Triumph Group Project Site Collection

Implementation of BrightWork started at the beginning of the Triumph project life-cycle, demand management. Demand management is tied to both the governance and approval processes, so it is a vital area of project management. Next up was project collaboration, followed by project programs, and finally project portfolio management. Triumph wanted to get it right the first time with project management advocates in place to assist with user adoption and get the most out of the tool.

Triumph has gone a step further by leveraging the reporting function to handle the road map of potential projects. This road map includes some resource planning for predicting future requirements.

Triumph Group Road-map of Projects

There are approximately 150 Named Users of BrightWork at Triumph, with a mix of Project Managers, IT team members, and users from the business team. Most of their Project Managers work another job function in IT and are known internally at Triumph as “project managers by accident”, so it was critical to configure an environment where they could be successful. Over the past several months, the IT PMO have completed nine projects using BrightWork and have over 117 projects underway. The projects being managed by BrightWork range from infrastructure, security, network, and service desk to end user computing. 62% of projects being managed by BrightWork are not IT driven; however, someone from the IT team is managing the project, for example, there are projects related to human resources, supply chain and legal.

Triumph Group’s IT Project Office in BrightWork

Specific Benefits Triumph Group Have Realized Since Deploying BrightWork:

1. Better Governance – Triumph Group went from little or no formal project management processes to BrightWork, which provided a governance process for the framework developed for the IT PMO.
2. Improved Visibility – The team quickly began to get an understanding of every area of a project as well as the pipeline of projects, whether by date, sponsor, business unit etc. Sometimes similar or duplicate projects are proposed and BrightWork has allowed Triumph to identify those projects, thus saving resources such as time and budget.
3. Automation via Workflows – Being able to have projects go through the approval process via automatic notifications allows leadership to approve, query, comment, and keep track of projects directly within BrightWork.
4. Robust Reporting – Triumph can create the required dashboards and reports within BrightWork with very little technical consultation. Many of these reports aggregate complex data from across multiple sites. The dashboards are accessible by senior management, therefore saving time on project report administration.
5. Simple Scheduling Functionality – Having built-in scheduling functionality in BrightWork has saved Triumph Group the expense of having to purchase Microsoft Project licenses for users who only need light project scheduling. Most project managers at Triumph Group are “project managers by accident”, who do not need the extensive scheduling that comes with Microsoft Project.