One of the largest privately-held staffing companies in the United States, the client’s team includes more than 8,000 internal employees and 90,000 contract employees working with customers around the world.

While the client’s core business growth is phenomenal, they are also diversifying into new industries, such as health care. This growth puts tremendous strain on IT resources supporting the growing list of projects, from business-critical IT infrastructure to meet the ever-increasing demands of business growth. System enhancements are underway to standardize business practices across newly acquired business units. The CIO’s vision for the future of IT includes improved performance in delivering projects, while maintaining costs and holding staffing levels to the absolute minimum. Implementing a PMO seemed a logical approach to achieving this vision.

After an unsuccessful first attempt at implementing a PMO, the Company then turned to Project Champions’ expertise in PMO implementation for very diverse clients over a wide range of industries. Project Champions utilized a PMO Implementation Model developed over many years of experience. After conducting an assessment of existing levels of project management maturity and competency, the Project Champions team converted their findings into actionable tasks grouped by actions to be taken in the short term for immediate gains, along with mid-term and long-term tasks. They customized a project management methodology for the client’s business climate that comprised traditional project management, agile project management and the touch points between project management and SDLC (Software Development Life Cycle) methodologies. Culture change was sparked through the establishment of PM Workgroups and other professional training, performing project reviews and project health checks, addressing the need for a project governance structure, and implementing systems for improving project portfolio management and resource management/planning. Finally, metrics were introduced so that resulting gains in project performance and productivity due to the PMO implementation could be tracked.

Within six months, Project Champions delivered a PMO with industry standard functions, including a project management process methodology, resource management, and programs for project management training, coaching and mentoring. In addition, Project Champions assisted the Company with the software selection process for a project portfolio management tool to address portfolio and resource management. The resulting visibility into projects allowed the client to identify those projects in need of corrective action and immediately implement project recovery strategies. All projects flagged as “red” by the new project status reporting system, valued at more than $13 million, were recovered. These successes significantly improved project manager morale as well as project performance and customer satisfaction.

Because of these results, the Company also added a Project Champions Program Manager to one of the more troubled IT projects. The project was experiencing severe scope creep, was not adhering to the project schedule, and was in danger of going over budget. Within four weeks, the Project Champions Program Manager, working closely with the client’s project managers, was able to turn the project around, meeting project deliverable dates while keeping the project within budget. Project Champions continues to partner with the Company to support the successful execution of this multi-year project.

The main challenge faced the company was :

a. Implementing PMO

b. Standardize business practices

c. Improve project performance for business growth

d. Lack of IT support

• ***PROVIDE A SUMMARY/OVERVIEW ON THE WRITING BELOW****
• Provide a critique of the writing (evaluate/ analyze/ assess).
• Discuss its usefulness/ benefits to the discussion on HRIS implementation—based on your knowledge of HRIS and HRIS implementation.

A multimedia company planned to offer a special benefits package to a select group of employees to retire early, which would provide cost savings to the company, as well as meet some of its other needs, such as providing promotional opportunities to help attract and retain younger employees. The special package included granting additional years of service for the purposes of calculating retirement and retiree medical benefits, granting additional age to employees to be used in the calculation of eligibility for early-retirement incentives from the pension plan, and eliminating some portion of the normal reductions in pension plan benefits for those taking early retirement. The cost of implementing these changes in the existing system for the estimated eligible group of just over 500 employees was prohibitive due to the complex nature of the calculations involved.The project was in danger of being canceled until a careful needs analysis was done. For 500 employees, did the solution need to be fully automated? Did the employees need to be able to model their retirement benefits on the Internet? How much manual work could be relied on to handle the workload? Did the project need to be repeatable?The answer for the multimedia company was to build a simple solution outside its HRIS using spreadsheet and word merge applications and to couple that simple solution with a high touch customer service group that was able to respond to the needs of program participants, manage the increased manual paperwork requirements, and perform the interventions into the system to make the components that had to be automated, such as the payment of benefits, function properly. The program that had nearly been canceled was a success, so much so that it was repeated the next year in another company division.Implementing the changes in the existing HRIS would have been the obvious solution, but creating a one-time solution when it appeared there would be little future need for a complicated implementation was the right choice in this case. Careful, honest, and practical needs analysis made possible what had been impractical due to cost concerns. It should be noted, however, that the HRIS provider recognized the need the multimedia provider company had expressed and later made a decision to augment its software to include features that would provide greater flexibility for future offerings, meeting a need the provider had not recognized during its own original planning and needs analysis.