Client:
International Financial Services Company
Problem:
Following the introduction of the Sarbanes-Oxley legislation, the head office of the company in the USA, was imposing its Project Management Methodology (PMM) on all of its international offices. The London office had none of the project management tools available at head office and the IT projects undertaken were substantially smaller in scale than those undertaken in the USA. These projects had been documented using MSProject, MSExcel spreadsheets and MSWord based reports, but usage and style varied between project managers and the management reporting was sporadic. An internal investigation had identified MSProject Portfolio as a possible solution.
Solution:
stpsolutions was engaged to produce a requirements specification and subsequently to develop the solution and project manage the deployment. It was identified that the majority of the requirements could be accomplished using SharePoint Server 2007 together with MS Project Server and that MS Project Portfolio was not strictly required. As the client had no Sharepoint Administration capabilities at the commencement of the pilot project, these were supplied initially by stpsolutions, with training provided for the client's system administrators. All servers and databases were configured for Sharepoint and the MSProject Server application loaded. To model the PMM requirements, Sharepoint Lists and workflows were customised to provide the seven decision gates required by PMM. The workflows ensured that the project could not proceed past a control gate without the correct sign-off from the project sponsor. All the evidence to support this was stored within Sharepoint. Different templates were cretaed to handle small medium and large projects - combining some of the control gates for smaller projects. Dashboards were created for senior management to be able to view the current status of all projects in real-time.
Outcome:
- The London office passed both the Internal and External Sarbanes Oxley Audits on its project management systems.
- Senior Management no longer had to rely on a periodic report of project status, they could view the current status in real-time.
- Over twenty project managers used the PMM templates to manage all of their projects.
- Added benefits were gained from using standard Sharepoint functionality. In particular, there was a single, version controlled document repository for each project. No longer were there multiple versions of the same document being circulated by email. Each project was set up with two email accounts, one that stripped out all attachments and stored them in the Sharepoint repository and the other was used to record a blind copy of every email related to the project, creating a single store of evidence.