Tres Aguilas Management (TAM) in San Antonio, Texas is a vital business unit of a holding company for the 60+ year old hamburger chain Whataburger® and Tres Grace (TG). Both organizations have a variety of business interests and holdings in the Lone Star state and across the southern United States including the restaurant chain which has over 700 stores.

The Enterprise Group within TAM acts in the capacity of a Project Management Office (PMO) and is charged with planning, scheduling, and achieving milestones for a series of projects and related programs. All of which needs to be accomplished on-time and within budget while providing the appropriate business intelligence to leadership and stakeholders for making strategic decisions about the business. Projects include, among others, construction, business development, and technology planning.

Because of steady business growth, the increasing number of programs and projects that TAM’s Enterprise Group is responsible for successfully planning and executing has reached a critical mass where it has begun to outgrow the tools that are currently in place. As 2 forward thinkers, Mark Dubay, the Enterprise Group’s Business Architect and David Roznovsky, its Portfolio Manager, have taken the lead role to solve this challenge using proven technology. Both executives recognize that TAM is a maturing organization and requires a more robust and centralized system that will allow them to manage the many tasks, milestones, and resources that are the building blocks of their key initiatives.

Some of the key challenges, among others, that have been facing the Enterprise Group because of burgeoning business growth coupled with a commensurate increase in the demand for project and portfolio management services include:

• Consolidating and increasing visibility of all vital project data in the system
• Understanding demand and capacity through central resource management
• Making all tasks visible to team members in the organization for updating
• Creating a central repository for all project documents and artifacts for quick access
• Developing new and automated business intelligence from a centralized database

Additionally, both Mark Dubay and David Roznovsky noted that there has also been significant interest from their organization’s leadership on how information from other business systems can be connected to project information, particularly financial information that exists separately. Upper management is interested in gaining business intelligence from schedule and resource information so the organization will be able to operate at a quicker pace and can make decisions faster when initiatives or investment opportunities reveal themselves.

After evaluating numerous options, TAM decided to work with EPM Solutions, a Microsoft Gold Partner with offices in Silicon Valley, to manage the configuration, customization, and deployment of an enterprise Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) system. The specific tool chosen was Microsoft Project Online which would be hosted in the cloud by Microsoft in its own secure environment. “Choosing to have the services hosted in the cloud by Microsoft rather than on premises and supported by EPM Solutions was a cost-effective solution with the burden of maintenance being outsourced,” Mark Dubay noted, “we were also very pleased to have EPM Solutions spearhead all the necessary configurations and customizations needed for a full roll-out.”

As part of the engagement, two days were spent at TAM’s home offices in San Antonio to conduct discovery and gather functional requirements for configuring the system in a way that would allow TAM to achieve its goals and realize the expected business value from the system. After the discovery period, EPM Solutions built the system requested using Microsoft Project Online and its foundation SharePoint. As part of the solution, EPM Solutions also created and delivered automated business intelligence components that closely mirrored some of the legacy reports that TAM had been pulling together from multiple data sources during each reporting period for its leadership.

Several months since deployment and roll-out, the Enterprise Group has been successfully using Microsoft Project Online to manage the plethora of projects across all its program categories. They have also asked EPM Solutions to make further enhancements and refinements to extend the initial features and functionality.

Visibility and Consolidation of All Projects. Now, TAM is enjoying full visibility of all its projects and programs in the Project Center of Microsoft Project Online. “For the first time, we can see, in real-time, all our projects instantly organized by programs, project types, or last milestone achieved. Each project is coded with color indicators that allow us to see if a project is tracking on time to its baselined completion date,” said Sam Dickey, the lead project manager during the implementation with EPM Solutions. TAM’s leadership also has a direct and real-time window into all this data for making strategic business decisions as well.

Demand and Capacity through Central Resource Management. With the deployment of Microsoft Project Online, TAM has now developed several project templates that emphasize the effort or hours required by the resources assigned to each line item task in a project schedule. This information is now being compiled into the enterprise resource pool, a centralized database of resource information, where it can now be used to generate on-the-fly reports that describe overall organizational demand and capacity in detail. For the first time, the Enterprise Group and leadership can get a full and accurate picture of resource utilization. With this knowledge, they can make more informed decisions about organizational demand and capacity, allowing the organization to be more efficient and nimble when deploying resources for critical project work.

Task Visibility and Updating. Prior to the deployment of Project Online, TAM had to rely on more traditional communication methods to get status updates from resources on the tasks they had been assigned. But now, according to Sam Dickey, “for the first time our team members have full visibility of all the tasks they are assigned across multiple projects. Updating is as simple as typing in a percentage completed and clicking the send button.”

Central Repository for all Project Documents and Artifacts. With the roll-out of Microsoft Project Online, the Enterprise Group has been able to reorganize all their important project documents and artifacts so they are easily accessible from a central repository and directly related to each project.

Automated Business Intelligence. David Roznovsky stated, “The Enterprise Group is looking to manage projects more by exception and priority.” Thus, EPM Solutions created a series of specific reports and business intelligence that pulls data from Project Online, as well as other internal business systems within TAM that provides a fuller picture and emphasizes the exceptions and priorities to make appropriate business decisions in real-time. The reports are impressive and allow the user to filter and slice information in real-time. For example, the Project Progression reports allows the Enterprise Group to view vital information about a project’s health and condition in a “one sheet” format. A similar report was also developed to provide details of the status of an entire program.

Project Managent

Resource Management