The Challenge: Reliable Insights into Project and Portfolio Health and Status

Seattle IT relied on multiple, often redundant and difficult-to-use systems, spreadsheets, and manual processes to support project management, resource management, and portfolio management. These systems made it difficult to access reliable data on a timely basis. They also limited the IT Department’s ability to provide transparency to decision-makers regarding project health and status.

Seattle IT needed a solution that could act as a one-stop shop for all their project and portfolio management needs. This included industry-leading features to support project and portfolio management best practices, automation to reduce manual work, robust reporting, and transparency for project teams and decision-makers. They also needed out-of-the-box functionality to avoid the additional costs and time associated with customization.

The Solution: Project Delivery

Partnering with Rego Consulting, the City of Seattle’s IT Department selected Clarity (Clarity PPM) as their Project Portfolio Management Solution (PPMS). Both Seattle Public Utilities and Seattle’s Department of Transportation were already using Clarity successfully, and the IT Department chose to share their instance with Seattle Public Utilities.

Seattle IT and Rego’s Clarity consultants built a roadmap for a successful migration that included:

• A Minimum Viable Product (MVP) to replace their existing functionality using Clarity
• Leveraging Clarity’s robust out-of-the-box capabilities to drive down costs and save time
• Not disrupting any of Seattle Public Utilities’ data or processes since they were sharing a Clarity instance
• Organizational Change Management and end-user training
• A plan for incremental learning and continuous improvements

By using Clarity, they were able to improve capabilities in several key areas including:

• Resource Management
  – Supporting resource requests and approvals
  – Assigning resources (individuals, teams, materials, costs) based on role and availability to projects and project activities
  – Tracking actual versus planned work effort on projects

• Project Scheduling
  – Building a detailed work breakdown structure (WBS) that reflected the work to be performed
  – Estimating work duration and resource units
  – Building and managing project schedules, including leveraging templates to improve forecasting
  – Tracking key schedule elements including actual performance against plan, milestones, dependencies, etc.

• Risk and Issue Management
  – Managing risks, issues, and change requests
  – Documenting response strategies and tracking status

• Project Reporting
  – Tracking project progress against higher-level initiative or program objectives
  – Tracking budget vs. actual scope, schedule, and budget, and documenting variances or changes with reasoning
  – Tracking project change requests and the decisions of the Change Control Board

• Project Intake and Registration
  – Capturing new ideas and project requests, including forecasted work, budget, and timelines

• Portfolio Prioritization
  – Prioritizing registered projects against set criteria and running what-if scenarios to determine the optimum mix of projects based upon organizational goals as well as financial and resource constraints

• Portfolio Reporting and Analysis
  – Designing and deploying executive reports that show the overall health of the portfolio and support portfolio analysis
  – Designing and deploying management reports that support decision making across portfolios, programs, projects, resources, tasks, and related elements
  – Deploying dashboards that provide management and project teams with near real-time insights into operational performance

• Collaboration
  – Collecting, tracking, and storing collaborative elements, including working documents

Rego provided tailored Clarity training for all users based on based on teams, topics, venues, and needs. They also trained Subject Matter Experts (SMEs) on each team to make sure they could support ongoing training.

The Results: Data to Support Decision Making

Increased Visibility for Decision Makers: With Clarity, Seattle IT can provide increased transparency and fiscal accountability for IT project investments. This includes greater visibility into project health and status, and portfolio performance and outcomes. Clarity’s robust dashboards and views allow employees and decision makers to see the project and portfolio information they need, instantly.

Adoption of Best Practices: It is now easier for Seattle IT to implement project and portfolio management best practices. For example, the team was able to integrate prioritization and idea scoring into their project records within Clarity. This enabled a better understanding of how each project fit with others and aligned with the city’s goals – enabling more effective portfolio management.

Using Clarity, project managers can select from pre-established, standard work breakdown structures that reflect best practices and incorporate city standards and processes to guide more consistent project planning and management.

Optimized Resource Utilization: Improved visibility into resource utilization reduces delays in project starts, minimizes resource overallocation and project delays, and limits resource under-allocation and missed opportunities to deliver chargeable services.

Easy Reporting: Now Seattle IT can offer immediate actionable insights to leadership so that they can make better decisions faster. They have reduced redundancies, improved data accuracy, and now leverage near real-time data and information to support better data-driven decision making.

Less Manual Work: With Clarity, the processes that were previously done manually using multiple spreadsheets and tools, are now automated. This saves employees time to focus on more important work, while also reducing errors that came from reconciling multiple sources of data.

The Road Ahead: Maturing Portfolio Management Practices

Improved Overall Project Delivery: With access to built-in best practices, automated workflows, and access to lessons learned, Seattle IT will improve consistency and mitigate risk on projects. Additionally, they now have a documented target to increase the percentage of total projects that complete within a percentage variance of schedule and budget.

Improved Project Oversight: Independent, portfolio-level oversight enabled by Clarity will support Seattle IT’s delivery quality and projects that achieve planned outcomes.