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Project Management for Banking Services

Happy State Bank

"Project Insight helped us to better understand and control our project management processes by providing the visibility to plan ahead on the effects of overall projects, resources and workloads."
- VP, IT Project Management

Main Challenges

Like 90 percent of our potential customers, Happy State Bank was challenged managing their projects with Excel sheets and Word documents. "We weren't managing projects, projects were managing us," said the VP of IT project management, who was hired specifically to create and run the new PMO (project management office) for Happy State Bank.

As a first step toward organizing the PMO, the bank opted for MS Project Desktop and SharePoint for its project management solution. Considering the large investment in both solutions, Happy State Bank decided to leverage their investment in those tools. However, the lack of resources for internal plug-ins and integration between both systems created some unique challenges which became time consuming and inefficient. As the bank matured into a more project-oriented organization they quickly outgrew their home-grown project management system. Their project management challenges were still unresolved, including:

  • No centralized control of the project creation process
  • Difficult to manage resource allocation and utilization
  • Scattered project information
  • Too many manual processes – time tracking, issues, reports, etc.

Pushing project data back and forth between MS-Project and SharePoint was not the solution the bank had hoped for. Time constraints, project interruptions and lack of reporting were the leading factors in the search for a new project management solution.

"Eventually, the juice was not worth the squeeze," quipped the VP of IT project management.

Why Project Insight

Happy State Bank had its requirements well defined. They wanted a project management software that fulfilled these requirements, but that was also fit and user friendly for their team.

  • Easy to use
  • MS-Project import and export
  • Project proposals and requests
  • Easily create Project Baselines
  • Project templates
  • Resource allocation and management
  • Document storage and file collaboration
  • Risk and Issue management
  • Budgeting and Costing
  • Time and Expense Management
  • Permissions
  • Dashboards, KPIs and powerful reporting

When searching for a new project management solution, the bank had considered Microsoft Project Server, but was overwhelmed by the complexity of that system.

The powerful yet user friendly features of Project Insight made sense for the bank's now more mature project management team. Along with the team's growing knowledge and understanding of project management processes, was the growing need for project visibility.

This meant more detailed reports and less time creating them. In the early stages of manual reporting, the team was spending long days prior to meetings creating reports which are now created with a couple of clicks within Project Insight. Most importantly, these reports show real time data, and are visually appealing graphs for executives and project teams.

Baselines and resource allocation are now an important part of the team's project visibility and review process. Before Project Insight, the team did not understand the power of project baselines. Today, Project Insight's baseline feature helps the team understand why and how a project slips and the impact it will have on their workloads and resources. For example, if a project is delayed, they can account for resource availability ahead of time.

The Results

What they liked about Project Insight:

  • Centralized project data
  • Effective resource allocation
  • Real time project reports
  • Time and expense management

The overall culture of the Happy State Bank team has taken a positive turn towards being more organized, productive and project management oriented. Project Insight has helped them centralize their project data and redefine their project management practices in a more consistent manner.

Project managers are able to prioritize and account for their workloads and resources. Everyone on the team has assigned tasks and know the priority of their tasks. This has helped the team save time by eliminating long meetings and endless email exchange. For example, a two to three month project that consisted of approximately twelve meetings, with Project Insight only required two meetings.

The flexible and powerful reporting in Project Insight allows project managers, executives and stakeholders to be at ease with real time project status.

abritas

"Project Insight [gives us] the ability to have a complete picture of the actual project costs incurred to date and the expected forecasted profit at project completion."

Vizion

"Project Insight's reporting […] have put us in total control. This quarter I can honestly say we have the best-run operation we've ever had in the life of the company."

Nation Western Life

"Project Insight [...] customer support is superior to all the other companies that we were evaluating."

Andesa

"Project Insight has also helped improve accountability at Andesa Services!"
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