Customer Success Story
PIMSOL
Providing visibility for billion-dollar defense programs using Deltek WelcomHome™
The Challenge
PIMSOL is a Huntsville, Alabama-based systems integrator that combines expert program management knowledge with project management tools to create custom solutions for its aerospace and defense clients. The government and many Department of Defense contractors rely on PIMSOL to meet their program information management needs.
A major client in the Army came to PIMSOL with some very specific needs. “The client wanted to be able to access a dashboard and see everything he needed to know about his program in fifteen minutes,” says Rick Curns, president of PIMSOL. “He wanted to see exception reporting and know if anything was late. He also wanted to see information from the program contractors.”
Specific requirements from this customer included visibility, regardless of location, via a dashboard; exception reporting for Integrated Program Teams (IPT); the ability for superiors to see metrics without needing a briefing; and integration of earned value, schedule, and risk information. “One of the other tenets that we had for the project was that we couldn't disrupt what they were doing on the programs. We could pull data — but we could not interrupt their schedule or processes,” explains Curns.
Other clients also had similar requirements. Many government Project Management Offices (PMOs) and contractors are experiencing the need for visibility into program status and a single point of access for program management and control. With their expertise in program management and systems integration, PIMSOL saw this as a great opportunity.
The Solution
Rather than developing a system from scratch, PIMSOL chose a more cost-effective solution. They sought an established product with a flexible architecture to which they could add specific functionality and integrate their own project information product called PSC II. “We looked at a number of software products and decided on the WelcomHome project management portal,” says Curns. “We chose WelcomHome because it already had a lot of the capabilities that we needed straight out of the box. It also gave us the ability to customize and extend it very nicely to meet the specific needs of the program.”
The Benefits
By combining WelcomHome with their own PCS II product, PIMSOL set up a portal environment that gave all stakeholders a single point of access for all program information. “The program manager, IPT leads, and functional leads as well as their counterparts on the contractor side all now use the portal to manage their part of the program,” explains Curns.
PIMSOL configured the portal around four levels of information (summary Program Executive Office data, summary project data, project IPT data, and contractor data) in order to provide individual project management control with level-up visibility. “One of the advantages of WelcomHome is the product's role-based security and the organization of information,” comments Curns. “It makes it really easy for us to segregate data.” On such high-profile defense programs, it is essential that information is only accessible by the right people.
Custom WelcomHome dashboards and project home pages were developed by PIMSOL for the program managers and IPTs to reflect their reporting needs. “The dashboards have really hit home with program managers,” says Curns. “They are easy to use and anagers no longer have to look through forty pages of Microsoft Project® Gantt charts to find something.”
“We took information that is captured in scheduling, cost, risk, and quality systems and connected it all into WelcomHome. Exception reporting shows if something is late or overdue based on the program's performance criteria and thresholds. For example, we use red, yellow, and green indicators to show if cost information goes over the earned value thresholds.” This has given unprecedented visibility into program status quickly and easily.
The WelcomHome/PCS II framework is set up to mirror the program processes and offer insight into all key aspects of a project. “You can take a new person and put them into training for an hour,” comments Phil Anglin, Sr. Software Analyst, PIMSOL. “Afterwards, they would have an incredible orientation to the whole project. I don't know of any other product that gives somebody a logical walkthrough of an entire project office in this way.”
A key advantage of the WelcomHome/PCS II system is that it does not affect the systems and procedures already in place. With each program, data is stored in a whole range of systems from Excel® to old legacy mainframes. WelcomHome's integration capabilities, powered by PSC II on the backend, allow data to be pulled from disparate systems and integrated into one single interface. “One of our clients refurbishes aircraft, so they use a completely different type of system,” says Curns. “Yet, we can use the same functionality to incorporate aircraft information, like tail number and critical part data, into the dashboards too. That's the power of the portal!”