Catapult Systems helps
Baylor College of Medicine
Craft Project Management Vision
The Baylor College of Medicine (BCM) Information Technology department manages infrastructure and development projects at one of the country’s most respected medical schools. The team of 150 IT employees handles support for 35 departments and more than 12,000 users. Due to the broad spectrum of customers and requests, the team is tasked with managing many competing priorities which demand the same limited resources.
BCM IT formed a Project Management Office (PMO) to manage resource allocation, project schedules and budgets while fulfilling the College’s multiple missions. The PMO identified two primary issues that could be improved with technology. First, they needed to establish a way to consolidate all IT projects into a single system so that their schedule and cost status could be viewed in a single location. They also needed to implement a means to manage their human resources and forecast resource availability.
The decision was made to replace a set of custom applications with something more robust and easier to maintain. After reviewing many options for creating an information and collaboration infrastructure that would be flexible, easy to use, easily accessible, they chose to implement Microsoft’s Enterprise Project Management (EPM) & SharePoint solutions. They selected Catapult Systems to design and implement a pilot system for the College because BCM felt that Catapult’s approach and methodology best fit their environment.
The Catapult Systems team used their proven project methodology to help BCM clarify their technology needs to enable project management tracking and improved collaboration. Then, through workshops with IT executives, they defined requirements and designed a prototype of the product, refining it before configuring the application for the pilot program. The solution for the information and collaboration infrastructure used Microsoft’s Enterprise Project Management (EPM) and Collaboration platforms. It was comprised of Microsoft Project Server 2003, SharePoint Portal Server and Windows SharePoint Services and leveraged SQL Server 2000 as the database layer. The solution was branded with BCM's corporate colors, styles and logos.
Development and implementation of their new infrastructure took 12 to 16 weeks. Catapult then developed training materials and trained the pilot team, so that BCM could implement the final platform themselves. The pilot team tested the application for approximately two months. Following the pilot program, BCM IT made the necessary adjustments to the platform and rolled it out to all of IT at the beginning of their fiscal year.
The new platform is primarily used by IT employees to track time, as well as provide custom project templates using BCM’s project methodology. It also provides Web access views based on custom project, task and resource attributes. BCM plans to roll the project tracking application out to other administrative departments in the College. Their new SharePoint collaboration platform provides BCM’s IT with workspaces for each project to collaborate, manage change requests and track issues and risks. Catapult continues to assist BCM with their plans for future project management assessment and definition.
Dramatically improved project management due to centralized project tracking and real-time project status reports, allowing for more proactive project managementEnhanced resource management through resource availability analysis and forecasting
Increased executive visibility of all IT projects and resourcesImproved interaction within teams using new collaboration platform Increased project data availability improves communication with BCM IT’s customers
In the future, the College hopes that the ability to track projects and resources accurately will help them identify specific staffing needs. They also now have the infrastructure in place to create a centralized IT knowledgebase.