The Challenge

A province selected a crown corporation to administer a substantial program that was originally managed by the federal government. The program consisted of numerous sub-projects with hundreds of documents. Each project was at a different phase in its development lifecycle. Documents were stored on a network drive and categorized into folders and sub-folders. As the number of documents increased it became progressively difficult to locate a document through the maze of folders. Moreover there was no easy way to manage different concurrent workflows on tracking the creation of artifacts, tracking issue progress or other items.

The Solution

MERAK was selected to design and create a PMO site. All documents were posted to one library and driven entirely by metadata. Finding documents was a easy as filtering on a column. Metadata included project identification and artifact types. Issue tracking was set up with a defined workflow process. Metadata that was added to the issues, associated them to projects and linked them to relevant documents. A task management area was set up to track tasks beyond software development which was tracked elsewhere. All tasks had custom metadata columns associated with them and the ability to link them to relevant documents. Issues were cross linked with tasks where needed.

The aim was to have one workspace where the entire team could collaborate and work on joint activities. People did not have to go to different sites or drives to look for things. Everything was in one place that looked the same and required the same steps to find.

The Benefit

Introducing the PMO site designed by MERAK improved productivity and significantly reduced frustration. The PMO site as so successful, many other areas of the organization have adopted similar approaches and there are several projects in the pipeline to create collaboration sites for all functional divisions.