About the Client
The Client is a leading not-for-profit healthcare service provider in the USA. With a vast network of 17,000 professionals and 4,800 affiliated physicians, it operates seven reputed hospitals that provide extended healthcare services. The Client operates from New Jersey, supporting 11 counties and 4.9 million people, focusing on easy access and affordability of healthcare services.
Challenges and Considerations
The Client needed diverse technology solutions to conduct its business operations, which were catered to by specific internal projects. The project data was stored using separate Microsoft Project plans, and a ticketing system retrieved the information. This led to constraints and complications in rapid, timely access for organizational stakeholders.
The significant challenges that the client faced with the storage architecture included:
- The lack of a proper unified storage architecture led to project managers and team members working in siloes, leading to gaps in communication.
- Inherent challenges in interaction and collaboration led to implementation delays across the overall project lifecycle, mostly with seeking approvals.
- Lack of an intuitive and informative reporting format restricted project stakeholders and the top-level management visibility into individual project progress.
- An inconsistent approach to project data storage and access presented a potential risk to data integrity. There was, therefore, an overarching need for a standardized format for storing and accessing the project data.
With the above challenges causing a substantial business impact, the Client sought a solution offering a unified project repository that would be easily accessible and consistent in its architecture. An interactive interface and custom reporting capabilities for all the stakeholders would further provide easy visibility of all the stages of the projects.
With its successful association with New Era Technology, a Microsoft Solutions Partner, in the past, the Client chose us to develop and implement a solution that would address the above challenges and cater to the specific requirements that were needed.
Solution
New Era, with its vast expertise in providing custom solutions in the Microsoft technology stack, quickly assessed the requirements and suggested a solution leveraging Microsoft Project and Portfolio Management (PPM), as the Client was currently using Office 365 and SharePoint-which was the base for the Project Online application.
New Era started with a comprehensive assessment of the Client’s requirements for the process flow, beginning from the project initiation to the governance phase and ending with the closure, along with the approving authority for each stage. This served as a base for configuring the Project Online application to meet the desired objectives. The team developed a custom workflow using Microsoft Power Platform for the project intake process, apart from configuring other workflows to suit the various stages of the project flow.
The latter part of the solution involved the creation of custom reports using Power Platform, as well as modifying the out-of-box reports, enabling direct and informative visibility for all the stakeholders of the project.
Project Online met the Client’s requirements for a unified central repository of projects. This did away with the legacy system in use, improving the accessibility of critical project information.
It also enhanced the communication and collaboration across the project stakeholders, leading to better project management.
Savings in Time: The Project Online implementation reduced the time needed to access project information, with easy accessibility and real-time updates.