Recently, a senate bill was ratified, giving the State Chief Information Officer (SCIO) of a large state government new and expanded authorities for the approval and monitoring of IT projects. The bill aimed to change the ways state gov-ernment plans, budgets and manages Information Technology. At the time the bill was signed, the state lacked a clear enterprise view and visibility across their project portfolio. Determining where any given project was in the workflow, who needed to approve and the current project status proved nearly impossible. Reporting any meaningful project metrics from a portfolio perspective was also a major challenge. The state also looked to improve the management of IT projects by standardizing the type of project information collected and the process by which the information was gathered.

1. State Government Employs
Best Project Portfolio Management Practices
SCIO implements Project Portfolio Management (PPM) to establish project
governance framework and improve visibility across the state
A UMT Case Study
Challenge
Recently, a senate bill was ratified, giving the State Chief Information Officer (SCIO) of a large state government new
and expanded authorities for the approval and monitoring of IT projects. The bill aimed to change the ways state gov-
ernment plans, budgets and manages Information Technology. At the time the bill was signed, the state lacked a clear
enterprise view and visibility across their project portfolio. Determining where any given project was in the workflow,
who needed to approve and the current project status proved nearly impossible. Reporting any meaningful project
metrics from a portfolio perspective was also a major challenge. The state also looked to improve the management of
IT projects by standardizing the type of project information collected and the process by which the information was
gathered.
The state began looking at portfolio management solutions to address these needs. The key goals of any solution cho-
sen would be to develop a standardized governance framework across the state, improve reporting capabilities and
implement a standardized project assessment process for all agencies.
The state recognized the tool was the key piece of any solution, but that the change management and project portfolio
management processes around the tool were just as important and certain to be a challenge.
Solution
UMT’s portfolio management solution was selected to meet the state’s portfolio management requirements. The UMT
team worked with the recently created EPMO and SCIO Strategic Initiatives office to implement the Portfolio Manager
tool through a centralized group across the state, employing PPM best practices and methodologies.
Under UMT’s guidance, agency advisory workgroups were established in key areas such as project costs/benefits, stra-
tegic alignment, risk, and workflow based on their expertise. Designing a standardized workflow across the state was
the first step in creating a governance framework for all projects, and led to several key decisions in other workgroups.
One such decision was structuring the financial information to match the portfolio workflow, allowing reporting of
costs by project phase in the status reporting process.

2. A reporting workgroup was also formed to meet the existing requirements and identify new key metrics and portfolio
reports. In addition to the workgroups, guidelines were developed to import project schedule information to the tool
thru the MS project import function. A process was also developed to import the schedule information for one of the
state’s largest agencies that was using SAP instead of MS project to capture project phases & milestones.
Results
Implementing a PPM process proved to be a challenge, as many
of the concepts (transparency, accountability) were a new way of
thinking in state government. But the implementation proved to
be a great success, directly impacting 3 of the 7 initiatives from
the Statewide IT plan. Currently, over 300 users access the tool
on a regular basis. Engaging agencies early on in the decision-
making process proved to be a key for increasing adoption and
eased many of the potential change management and organiza-
tional issues.
While this initiative was implemented with state level require-
ments in mind, the tool quickly generated a “pull” instead of
“push” among the agencies. They quickly began to realize the
benefits of the new reporting capabilities and streamlined work-
flow governance, and were able to eliminate redundant process-
es and reporting previously done outside of the tool.
The number of projects being reported by agencies at the state level grew from 35 at the start of the implementation
to over 100 after several months in production, allowing for the desired visibility across the state and demonstrating
agency buy-in to the new PPM process.
The UMT methodology and Portfolio Manager tool now allow the state to have a consolidated repository of all projects
and a standardized governance framework and approval process across all state agencies. Robust reporting capabilities
from a portfolio perspective, including an executive level dashboard, as well as revised project status assessment guide-
lines are promoting better management of IT projects.
The success of the PPM implementation led to a full scale Application Portfolio Management (APM) implementation
under UMT’s guidance. The state is now turning its attention to analyzing new ways to enhance an end-to-end portfo-
lio management solution. MS Project Server, to strengthen collaboration across the state and agencies, full scale
portfolio optimization and use of the tool for non-IT projects are among the initiatives being considered.
# # #
Contributors: State CIO, Strategic Initiatives Office, EP-
MO, Agency advisory committee, 2 UMT
Consultants & 1 UMT Manager
Time to Success: 6 months
Deliverables: Central project repository, governance
workflow
Key Benefits: Improved reporting capabilities and pro-
ject assessment guidelines, streamlined
approval process, visibility across state’s
portfolio.
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