With several thousand employees and satellite offices strategically placed around the country, Europe, and the Middle East, M.C. Dean provides electronic security, telecommunications, life-safety, instrumentation and control, as well as command and control systems for a diverse group of markets. Its customers include Fortune 1000 corporations; universities; high-tech and biotech firms; Federal, state, and local government clients; and other organizations with large scale, complex, and mission-critical infrastructure needs.

The “lifeblood” of M.C. Dean’s business is based on responding to requests for proposals and regularly being awarded government and private contracts. A real challenge for the Project Portfolio Management Office (PPMO) and stakeholders at M.C. Dean—which simultaneously manages 200+ complex projects—was being able to accurately predict the workforce needs of the organization, given the ebb and flow of contracts awarded each year.

To improve its workforce needs and to increase its ability to ramp-up staff fast enough for incoming projects, it became evident that the current homegrown systems in place were on the brink of outliving their usefulness. An enterprise project portfolio management system that could capture all project, resource, and assignment information in a central repository would be essential for future growth. The system would also need to integrate with existing business intelligence tools and, most importantly, have a highly coveted custom component that could accurately determine workforce needs based on the probability of being awarded a contract.

EPM Solutions of San Ramon, California was ultimately awarded a large contract with M.C. Dean to customize and deploy a Microsoft-based Project Portfolio Management (PPM) system on premise to resolve the challenge posed. The specific tool chosen was Microsoft Project Server built on SharePoint. In the back of his mind, Ralph Scolamiero, the Senior Project Manager for M.C. Dean, had initial concerns because the company was “going through a big organization change at the time of the development, which added risks and made development of the user structure and resource titles somewhat challenging.”

Not deterred by potential risks, Greg Winterhalter, Senior Director, PPM Product Development and Chief Architect at EPM Solutions, masterfully led the project team to provide all the deliverables requested by M.C. Dean in the shortest timeframe available. To make this happen, Greg utilized an early version of FasTrack™, EPM Solutions’ streamlined delivery method for providing a best practices configuration of Microsoft Project Server on SharePoint. “This method,” Greg noted, “allows Microsoft PPM to be delivered with a common set of processes, documents, and templates, which increases the uniformity of a project manager’s work product.”

The centerpiece of the solution—a custom approach to accurately forecast workforce requirements based on the probability of being awarded a contract—was successfully developed and implemented by adding a complex arrangement of custom and calculated fields to Project Server with a proprietary formula that output an accurate probability of being awarded a contract. This probability could then be used with other modules in Microsoft PPM to more accurately predict workforce utilization and measure it against future capacity to determine where there might be any overallocation or under-utilization of project staff. From this standpoint, project prioritization and selection could be effectively managed by the PPMO, bringing M.C. Dean into the desired end state it had desperately hoped to achieve with this Microsoft-based solution.

EPM Solutions completed the engagement by providing an outstanding line of business integration between Project Server and M.C. Dean’s existing business intelligence systems, making it possible to view custom reports in real-time that provided all the necessary data visualizations for accurate workforce decision making. Now, in place, were all the working parts of the solution, synergistically operating together, even surpassing M.C. Dean’s original business requirements.

Now a known quality, EPM Solutions received generous sponsorship from M.C. Dean for a security clearance in order to partner on future government projects with them.

Project Server Migration

Resource Management