Challenge
To develop a business-side project management framework for accommodating the project needs of a rapidly growing, multi-site health care services company. Leveraging the strong functional team's intellectual property and processes, the objective of the initiative was to put in place a light project management framework that emphasized selecting and prioritizing project investments based upon the project's strategic and operational alignment. The engagement required altering the organization's project approval, funding, performance monitoring and coordination processes.

Approach
Numerous leaders, project practitioners, clients and staff were interviewed. The purposes of the interviews were to: define project prioritization criteria; gauge project and portfolio management maturity; harvest project management best practices already resident in the environment; document existing project processes, tools and standards; and build awareness for the portfolio management initiative.

Solution
Optimize! constructed a project evaluation and prioritization process that aligned with corporate strategy and a centralized repository for storing all project requests, active projects and archived projects. In addition, existing project management tools were matured to provide project performance data and dashboard reporting. As it was found that functional teams were managing projects satisfactorily, project management execution processes were only slightly enhanced.

Results
The client approved the use of the portfolio tools, models, reporting and repository for over 80% of their projects. Senior management concurred that doing so provided valuable direction regarding the use of corporate assets, and, because the framework was light, permitted them to adjust to changing client and market needs.