County IT Services

Working with many teams throughout an organization creates challenges like siloed communications and the need for many meetings to be on the same page for new and active projects. This is true for a large California County IT organization who supports hundreds of strategic projects in a county that impacts millions of people and millions of dollars’ worth of annual taxpayers’ funds. This IT County team requests, approves and manages projects that provide innovative, reliable, and secure IT solutions that support County departments and agencies across many cross-functional teams in support of infrastructure, network/VoIP, cybersecurity and more.

Through the years, this IT team evolved from a handful of individuals to a large resource pool of team members who track, execute, and report on visible city and county projects. Given the impact and severity of some of their projects, there is little room for error and lack of communication.  

CHALLENGE

Decentralized process, communication, manual tracking, multiple solutions, manual reporting

This team did not have centralized, standardized, and streamlined processes. Too often they experienced challenges in process that caused projects to be delayed and over-budget.

This team had been using an existing project management tool for many years to track dates and key deliverables; however, this solution was a manual tool, and many versions of a single project existed across the organization. This warranted the need to hold multiple meetings to bring everyone up-to-speed on the actual status of projects. Due to the growing number of projects being spearheaded by this team, their current solution was no longer feasible for their growing project scale.

Additionally, this team was tracking a single project using multiple solutions like email, various office tools, and a decentralized document management approach. Though the team was using a project tracker tool, they weren’t using project management best practices due to the lack of functionality this tool offered.

Every few weeks this team needed to report on project governance and timelines to key stakeholders. Due to the manual nature of their work, it was very timely to update key data and prepare reports to keep those stakeholders informed on project statuses.

SOLUTION

This IT team was able to find multiple synergies that are native to the Workfront ecosystem. By implementing best practices and recommendations, they trained their team and created opportunities for everyone to focus more on their work rather than disruptions or delays.

Bringing everyone together in a single platform was key to building synergy, visibility, communication, and collaboration

By using Workfront’s built in communication tools, this IT team was able to collaborate by posting updates and having conversations within the platform instead of email. As a result, meetings decreased 20% due to everyone’s ability to leverage the same platform and view status updates on active projects in real-time.

Standardizing project intake processes and automating business workflows

This team had a current intake process spanning two different systems and included a great deal of email conversations to request and approve any of their projects. By using Workfront, the request process was centralized and streamlined by utilizing standard intake data fields when requesting a project. As users submit their requests, Workfront automatically routes those requests to the correct team or individual to approve and process the request. If approved, the request is converted to a project while maintaining the original requestor data.

Increasing visibility into resources

Continued organizational growth had prompted the need for resource visibility and transparency. Scaling a resource pool of their size was difficult without Workfront’s resource functionality. Their lack of visibility into resource availability created many challenges when a single resource was expected to complete multiple tasks for multiple projects. This proved to be especially more difficult during the pandemic with the requirement of individuals need to work from home. Workfront was able to show project managers and stakeholders accurate timelines based on resource availability and the project team was able to provide a better work-life balance to their project contributors.

Providing real-time reporting to enable data-driven decisions

The IT Team had many manual processes to validate data and prepare status reports prior to using Workfront. By leveraging Workfront’s native reporting capabilities, the team was able to structure key reports to keep their project teams updated in real-time. They also leveraged the ability to automatically schedule monthly status reports to key stakeholders providing relevant KPIs associated with their projects.

Once a quarter this team would meet to enable the project managers to report on project status, risks, issues, updates, etc. With Workfront, they experienced a significant decrease in time and effort in preparing for meetings since the projects and reports are automatically updated in real-time as work items are completed.

BENEFITS

This IT team has taken Workfront’s built-in capabilities and created a culture of transparency.

This IT team was able to streamline and centralize existing and disparate processes.

This IT team was able to process twice as many requests due to the standardization and centralization of new project requests.

This IT team has seen a noticeable increase in project productivity as standard processes are leveraged in their day-to-day operations as well as saving time working rather than sitting in countless meetings.