Partnering with over 1,500 physicians at more than 220 outpatient surgery centers across the United States, AmSurg is the nationally recognized leader in development, management and operation of outpatient surgery centers. AmSurg owns and operates over 200 ambulatory surgery centers in 33 states. Their centers are primarily single specialty focused in gastroenterology or ophthalmology. AmSurg centers provide high quality, low cost surgical services with superior patient satisfaction.

Challenge

AmSurg needed a system to manage and track multiple medium-to-large projects at once. The projects often dealt with almost every department in the organization and many required rollout to more than 200 AmSurg surgery centers. There were also growing requests from senior management for the status of various “programs” and projects. AmSurg needed a way to track and manage the projects and programs they were undertaking, but the problem was that there was little organizational project management knowledge and few formal project management processes and policies. Also, whatever solution AmSurg chose had to leverage SharePoint, which was already in use throughout the organization.

Solution

AmSurg deployed BrightWork on SharePoint to facilitate the creation of project sites to standardize how projects are managed and to standardize how information about each project is stored. AmSurg evaluated several project management solutions, but settled on BrightWork for a number of reasons. They liked that BrightWork had:

· Multiple pre-defined templates for not only small and medium projects, but large projects as well

· The ability the modify the templates for their needs to create customized project sites

· BrightWork ran on top of SharePoint which allowed AmSurg to leverage their existing technology investment

AmSurg utilized a combination of out-of-the-box and customization to make BrightWork work for them. One way they did this, for example, was by customizing the form in the Project Issues list. Out-of-the-box, the BrightWork issue form has several detailed fields that make perfect sense in terms of project management, but many AmSurg users were actually confused by them. Easily, AmSurg hid those fields to shorten the form to only the fields they needed. They went on to customize a template to fit the way they manage projects. Now AmSurg can create a project site with the exact amount of management they need using their customized BrightWork template. AmSurg now uses BrightWork templates to store all project related work, such as project goals, documents, issues, project plans, etc. all in one place.

BrightWork also included a portfolio view to get a snapshot of all active projects in one place. This view allows managers to see all active projects and their statuses without having to navigate through the SharePoint environment to find them. The site is customized to show only the crucial data they want to track. BrightWork also allows AmSurg to print or email reports for senior management, allowing them to view reports and take action without have to log in to SharePoint to view it.