Children’s Hospital Boston is a comprehensive center for pediatric healthcare located in Boston, Massachusetts. As one of the largest pediatric medical centers in the United States, Children's Boston offers a complete range of health care services for children from birth through 21 years of age. Children’s Boston is the pediatric teaching hospital for Harvard Medical School and serves patients from over 150 countries. It is the world’s largest pediatric centered research enterprise receiving $225 million in annual research funding. For the past 21 years, Children’s Hospital Boston has been ranked #1 or #2 in the US News and World Report: “America’s Best Children’s Hospital”.

Challenge

The initial goal at Children’s Hospital Boston was to get a “snapshot” of the 20-30 on-going projects in the PMO. It was important that whatever solution they chose met certain requirements that would enable them to easily track work and projects in the PMO. The tool had to be:

• Integrated with SharePoint because team sites were already being used in the PMO

• Intuitively obvious - both easy to use for project managers and for the rest of the organization without any training

• Sustainable - which for Children’s Boston meant that project managers had to be able to update project statuses in less than 5 minutes

• Capable of roll-up reporting and graphical charting

• Capable of being customized and configured without any programming

Solution

Prior to implementing BrightWork, the PMO at Children’s Boston used traditional SharePoint Team Sites for project collaboration. The SharePoint sites were used to house and share project documentation and to formally track project risks and issues. SharePoint Team Sites replaced the previous method of collaborating by using folders on shared network drives. This method was suitable for managing individual projects, but the PMO needed a way to manage and report across all of its projects together.

With BrightWork, the PMO introduced the “Project Management Office Team Site” level which rolls up project data from the individual project sites into the centralized PMO site. To do this, they added a project status to the individual project team sites so project managers can update health indicators, enter status comments, track high level dates, at the project level. Any time those are updated, that information rolls up into a report on the Project Management Office level. The PMO site shows a high-level view of each project and some basic information about each one, including a Gantt that reflects the project timeline. The benefit here is that not only can the PMO get a snapshot of all the projects going on, but the report enables the PMO to drill down into individual project sites if they need more detail.

Next, they set up “Department Managed” project sites to manage work that falls outside of the larger projects in the PMO. This would include small projects that were not large enough to warrant their own project site but still needed to be tracked. The tool was so successful that executive management mandated that all project work going on in the department must be tracked in BrightWork.

The addition of “Department Managed” projects in the hierarchy required another level of organization-wide reporting. Another level, the “IT Project Tracker”, was added to take reports from both the IT PMO site as well as “Department Managed” projects and rolled them up in to a dashboard to report on all projects in the department.