Georgia SRTA Case Study

The Challenge

Like many organizations, the Georgia State Road and Tollway Authority (SRTA) was running into issues because they were not using a universal project management tool across teams, leaving project managers without guidance as to what processes or tools to use. With no set policy, project managers relied on Excel spreadsheets and emails to present data, prioritize their workload, and communicate across teams. Information from project management teams was presented through status reports and weekly updates, making it difficult to make real-time decisions. This created disorganization not only within individual teams, but across the organization as well.

When Project Management Office Director Carlos Trias started in 2018, he quickly saw issues with siloed teams, and realized the need to find a solution that would work for everyone. While most options were quite expensive, the Georgia SRTA was already paying for Office 365 Online. He decided to look further into SharePoint to see if it was the answer to their problems. However, like many companies who try to use SharePoint, he quickly realized that many users within the organization did not understand how SharePoint worked, and ran into roadblocks when trying to create the solution internally. Ultimately, Carlos realized the best solution was to reach out to someone from an outside organization to help implement their SharePoint deployment.

The Solution

After participating in a custom five-day SharePoint for Project Managers course, Carlos reached out to Tom Robbins for consulting opportunities to help them using Microsoft Project Online. Originally, they agreed on 100 consulting hours for the entire project. These hours were spent with the business units helping build a custom architecture to fit the needs of the organization. Tom conducted virtual and in-person meetings with internal stakeholders to properly gather business requirements, find out the mission and vision of what they wanted to accomplish, and analyze their use cases in order to build a brand-new system in Microsoft Project Online. With the information gathered, Tom helped configure, design, and build the platform to fit the specific needs the Georgia SRTA. Once the system was deployed, they refined it and fixed any bugs that were found.

After the initial deployment, Tom returned on-site to train the team members on the new system in order to increase user adoption. To provide the best results using the new technology, the Georgia SRTA wanted to create an internal training program. Tom conducted training sessions to teach internal trainers’ key strategies and best practices for orchestrating the trainings to guarantee adoption across teams.

The Results

With the successful deployment of the Microsoft Project Online platform, giving the organization full visibility and business intelligence into their project portfolio, the Georgia SRTA has increased their efficiency and productivity. Their dashboards provide real-time, immediate insight into more than 50 different projects.

By providing real-time data about resources, budget, and timelines, they freed up time that would have been spent aggregating the same data. This project and deployment of SharePoint with Microsoft Project Online allowed project management teams to break down siloes and collaborate using the SharePoint Project Managers Community. The portal created for project managers and other project participants is a space to ask questions, get answers and eliminate the need for internal email. They now also have a formal way to submit and weigh ideas aside their organization’s strategic drivers to decide which ideas become projects. Once these ideas are chosen, they go straight through the approval process.

With this successful initial deployment, their next steps will be to look toward the future at how they can incorporate this progress with a project management methodology. They also evaluated Microsoft Project Professional and the entire suite of Office 365 online tools to learn what worked best for them for them and have integrated those tools successfully. Carlos believes that with the help of Cprime Learning, they will be able to implement these methods and tools throughout the entire organization and continue to improve the way they work.

• Increased visibility into projects using the dashboard that provides real-time, immediate insight into more than 50 different projects at once
• Increased efficiency by utilizing real-time data on resources, budget, and timelines
• Sped up project approval process with a formal way to submit and weigh ideas aside their organization’s strategic drivers
• Increased transparency by giving organization full visibility and business intelligence into their project portfolio

If you’d like to see similar results in your organization, consider our Microsoft Sharepoint learning courses.

About Cprime

Cprime is an industry-leading, full-service global consulting firm with a focus on providing integrated and innovative solutions around digital transformation, product, cloud, and technology. With over 20 years’ experience, we provide strategic and technical expertise to businesses across more than 50 industries. Our team of advisors and technical experts have the know-how to meet organizations where they are to develop actionable solutions and solve business challenges. We also collaborate with our expansive network of partners to design, deploy, and harmonize technology stacks across organizations. Our mission is to empower visionary business leaders and teams to reimagine the future of work to achieve better outcomes.