Project Management for Healthcare ANSI Standards Organizations

ANSI Standards Organizations

"Project Insight being a web-based tool is invaluable. There's really nothing you can do in Microsoft Project on an aggregate level without investing a lot of money to enable people from around the world to report on projects together. Project Insight is perfect from that point of view."
- Project Management Office Director

Main Challenges

The director of the Project Management Office at this healthcare ANSI SDO has a different job than most PMO directors in other organizations. The organization is a professional association, so its 2,200 members are mostly IT professionals working in the healthcare industry. These professionals volunteer their time to develop standards, and specifications on some of hundreds of projects from locations around the country.

  • No real project management system in place
  • Unable to report on the status or progress of a project
  • Inability to report on the aggregate of all projects
  • Challenging to induce committee members to enter information on projects
  • Difficult for geographically dispersed team members to report on projects.

Because of their distance from each other, the teams had a difficult time communicating and reporting on the status of projects to each other, and to the organization at large. A few years ago, the organization created a home-grown project tracking application, but it lacked robust reporting capabilities. The director of the PMO noted, "We could do basic search and find, but we couldn't report on the health of a project, whether it was on time or late."

Why Project Insight

With a new PMO director on board, the healthcare ANSI SDO began a search for a project management system that would create:

  • An online, centralized project scheduling and status system
  • Accessibility by all project team members, including in house resources and third party team members
  • Resource allocation and workload balancing
  • Time tracking
  • Broad and real-time reporting capacity

After a review of the available project management systems the organization determined that Project Insight met all their criteria and offered the most robust product for the best overall value. The organization signed on with Project Insight in September 2006.

The Results

What they liked about Project Insight:

  • Easy to use
  • Web-based
  • Provides centralized project management
  • Simplifies key tasks making it an easy transition for team members
  • Multiple home pages
  • 'Collapse All' feature icon
  • Tabbing for quick access to custom fields
  • Simple to provide sub reports for each committee as they see fit
  • Strong value, with full complement of features at a reasonable price
  • Excellent product support.

While the organization's project methodology is in its early stages, the director of the PMO reports, "Project Insight has improved our processes because we can extract reports easily based on their status so that various committees can approve them in order for work to begin. Our processes were created independent of Project Insight, but it has been able to support those processes very well." As for reporting, the organization can finally put together sub-reports for each committee on demand. "With those reports," the director said, "I'm getting a lot of feedback that they want more information from Project Insight, which it can certainly deliver." In conclusion, the director said, "Project Insight being a web-based tool is invaluable. There's really nothing you can do in Microsoft Project on an aggregate level without investing a lot of money to enable people from around the world to report on projects together. Project Insight is perfect from that point of view."