Project Governance Portal Delivers Automation and Visibility
When an existing solution no longer met the needs of an award-winning investment management business, Abel Solutions was called upon to automate and improve the overall user experience.
Introduction
The Project Management Office (PMO) for the Investment Management arm of a Fortune 500 Retirement Planning Company sought out Abel Solutions to design and implement a Project Governance portal to serve as a project information repository as well as a platform for project governance-related workflows and forms.
An Existing Solution That No Longer Met Their Needs
The existing PMO solution originated from a smaller project management team that focused on projects for a specific department. It was tailored for that audience and had a narrower scope than what the PMO team’s responsibilities were expanding to include. With greater responsibilities, the PMO team desired to introduce a workflow-driven application to increase the team’s capabilities and oversight for all projects. Per the customer: “Our expectation is that a workflow will provide better guidance to the individuals running projects, which should lessen our handholding of the process.”
Key Goals and Objectives
Among the critical project objectives was the establishment of a documented and repeatable project governance workflow, which would accommodate for all project types and classifications. The updated solution should also provide a streamlined and user-friendly interface to guide Project Managers through the full process as well as automate the process of generating dashboards and reports to support the PMO team in the overseeing of the project portfolio.
Connecting the Right Tools For Success
We were able to leverage the Office 365 tenant that the customer already had up and running and created a new SharePoint Online site collection to serve as the portal. Nintex Workflow for Office 365 and Nintex Forms were layered on top of SharePoint Online to meet the automation and streamlined user experience needs. In addition, existing Microsoft Excel reports and dashboards were updated to leverage Power Query to pull and aggregate data directly from SharePoint, which eliminated many manual steps while providing the much-needed project portfolio oversight by the PMO team.