Challenge
This IT Department provides technical services to the state’s courts and judiciary partners. The Department needed the ability to plan and manage investments in Information Technology, at both an individual project and portfolio level. They needed to ensure IT investments were aligned with the judiciary’s business direction, were providing value to customers, were balanced to achieve goals across the agency, and were maximizing the use of scarce and costly resources.

The ability to collect and maintain information about IT investments was critical in order to measure, evaluate, and report on performance in terms of cost, benefit, risk, alignment and resource utilization. This information was being maintained in disparate spreadsheets throughout the organization. Significant staff time was being spent consolidating data, and even then the data was often not timely enough for managerial needs.

Solution
The Department selected CA Clarity PPM as their Project and Portfolio Management solution. They had limited budget and an aggressive timeline, and they needed a Clarity Services Partner with the proven ability to deliver on scope, budget and schedule. They turned to WinMill Software.

The Department and WinMill worked together to collect, analyze and document the Judiciary’s Project Portfolio Management business requirements. WinMill provided thought leadership in the areas of Clarity Best Practices and Industry Practices to help the project team align its business needs with the appropriate CA Clarity PPM functionality. Once the business requirements were finalized and approved, WinMill used an iterative design, prototyping and configuration approach that allowed for rapid implementation, and enabled the client to meet its aggressive schedule.

Highlights

• WinMill implemented Clarity in three (3) months, in exact accordance with the original project plan.
• The implementation includes project management, application management, portfolio investment performance measurements, reporting and dashboards, and resource capacity planning.
• The Department’s leadership now has visibility into its resource capacity by resource, resource role and organizational unit. This enables improved alignment of new project requests with resource availability and skills. 
• The application is providing benefit by consolidating investment and resource data into a single repository for improved management decision making.
• Subsequent phases are going to implement Portfolio Management for investment prioritization and Program Management for complex, multiple year business initiatives.