Weingarten Realty Establish Project Management Office on SharePoint 2013

Challenges

Weingarten Realty, a commercial real estate development company, had several IT development projects underway but did not have a tool around which executives and management could collaborate and track their progress.

In seeking a project management tool, Weingarten was trying to fulfil two primary needs. First, they wanted to establish Project Management Office to give management a place to collaborate and dashboards with better transparency into project timelines. They also needed to get portfolio capabilities and visibility across all projects as to what resources are working and when.

Weingarten also wanted a tool that would provide the organization with a better fundamental understanding of the principles of project management.

Solutions

Since Weingarten already had SharePoint deployed in the organization, their ideal solution would leverage the platform. BrightWork best practice templates and reporting were a perfect fit, so they deployed BrightWork on SharePoint 2013 to set up a virtual PMO and began leveraging the Project Standard template.
Even though they have only been deployed for a few months, the IT department already has 20 small projects (lasting anywhere from 40 hours to 3 months) and 1 large project (an ERP rollout estimated to last 2 years) entered and tracked in the system.

Perhaps the greatest benefit of the BrightWork solution for Weingarten Realty is the visibility senior executives now have.

It is incredibly important for executives to be able to track what projects the organization is working on and where they are investing their resources. Previously, they would have had to use a combination of email, Excel, and documents, which made visibility and collaboration quite difficult. With the BrightWork solution, senior executives have a centralized portal to see the status of all on-going projects. And the ability to report across programs and portfolios of projects gives great insight into the activities resources are currently working on.

Weingarten has completed Phase 1 of their deployment, which was a rollout of the tool to 15 users in the IT department. The planned Phase 2 of the BrightWork deployment is to roll out the system to the entire organization.