EPM Solution Increases Collaborative Efficiency for ...



Overview

Country: United States

Industry: Financial Services

Customer Profile

The First American Corporation is the nation’s leading data provider. It has more than 2,000 offices worldwide and reported annual revenues of U.S.$6.72 billion in 2004.

Business Situation

With operations throughout the United States and abroad, First American undertakes many multiregional projects, but the company had no single, shared repository for project plans and documents or unified view of its project portfolio.

Solution

Fujitsu Consulting, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, implemented a comprehensive Enterprise Project Management (EPM) solution featuring Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 and Microsoft Windows® SharePoint® Services.

Benefits

■ Improved collaboration

■ Better decision making

■ Improved resource utilization

■ Rising adoption with more than 600 active users

| | |“The Microsoft Office EPM Solution has increased awareness across our organization, improving our planning and quality of work. The consensus among users is that it has led to better communication overall.”

Kathleen Rondeau, Manager of Business Process Management, First American Title Insurance Company

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| | | |As a Fortune 500 company, the First American Corporation maintains offices throughout the world. In |

| | | |the past, the company had no centralized tool for managing cross-regional and departmental |

| | | |collaboration. Therefore, First American Title Insurance Company, the corporation’s largest |

| | | |subsidiary, hired Fujitsu Consulting, a Microsoft® Gold Certified Partner, to implement the Microsoft|

| | | |Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution, including Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 |

| | | |and Microsoft Windows® SharePoint® Services. Now in deployment for one year, the Microsoft Office EPM|

| | | |Solution has significantly increased productivity within the organization by improving collaboration,|

| | | |decision making, and resource utilization. With more and more of the company’s divisions asking to |

| | | |adopt the solution, the First American Corporation expects even greater benefits in the future. |

| | | | |

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| | | | |

Situation

The First American Corporation is the largest provider of business information in the United States with a focus on supplying the vast amount of data required for real estate transactions. Since 2002, the company has been recognized by Fortune magazine as one of the top 500 companies in the United States, with U.S.$6.72 billion in revenue in its most recent fiscal year.

Because First American maintains more than 2,000 offices throughout the United States and abroad, many of its projects involve collaboration across several regions. Until 2003, the company had no central repository that all IT staff members could access for shared project plans and documents. “Cross-visibility within or across departments didn’t exist before—period,” says Kathleen Rondeau, Manager of Business Process Management for the corporation’s principal subsidiary First American Title Insurance Company. “Unless you received a phone call or e-mail on the topic or attended a meeting that incorporated it as a part of the discussion, often you had no way of knowing that a project existed in another department—even when that project could impact your own progress.”

Not having a shared repository for project data hampered productivity. Says Rondeau, “We would e-mail documents around to other team members, but we frequently ran into problems with this process—people would be looking at an outdated version of a document or not have a copy at all. That method of communication is difficult because you don’t know who is missing critical information.”

Project management personnel at First American Title Insurance Company believed the company would increase its operational efficiency by establishing a single point of access to project information. They also saw the potential to improve the company’s project management process in various other ways:

■ First American wished to implement stronger resource management processes to balance workloads and enable resources in different locations to be accessible for teams across the enterprise.

■ The company wanted to improve its project-tracking capabilities so that it could monitor project budgets and schedules more closely and establish objectives-based dashboards for its project portfolios.

■ The company also wanted its project data consolidated, so project managers could better project timelines and staffing needs for the future.

Solution

After considering three different options, First American chose to deploy the Microsoft® Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution, including Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 and Microsoft Windows® SharePoint® Services. “We found Microsoft Office Project Server [2003] to be much more user-friendly than the other options,” explains Rondeau. “Many of our staff members were comfortable with the Microsoft Office EPM Solution because they were already using Microsoft Project 2002 or Windows SharePoint Services.” First American also determined that the solution would be cost-effective: so many of its personnel had Project 2002 on their desktops that the company’s licensing costs would actually be lowered by switching to Project Server 2003. Finally, the company was reassured by the strong relationship it already had with Microsoft. “We knew that with the Microsoft solution, we already had the support we needed in place,” says Rondeau.

First American interviewed multiple implementation partners and selected Microsoft Gold Certified Partner Fujitsu Consulting to deploy Project Server 2003 due to Fujitsu’s experience with EPM solutions and expertise in Microsoft software. “Fujitsu has developed an approach to implementing the Microsoft Office EPM Solution that is repeatable and predictable since we’ve done it so many times,” says Steve Nye, Business Development Manager for Fujitsu Consulting.

Fujitsu proceeded to plan and execute an international deployment of the Microsoft Office EPM Solution, spanning First American Title Insurance Company branches in California, Illinois, Texas, and its India offshore development team. The team installed Project Server 2003 at one of the company’s data centers in Dallas, Texas on three Compaq servers, running the Microsoft Windows Server™ 2003 Standard Edition operating system, part of Microsoft Windows Server System™ integrated server software. Fujitsu Consulting integrated these servers with another housing a Microsoft SQL Server™ 2000 database. The solution also includes two Domain Controller servers and two development servers, also running Windows Server 2003.

Fujitsu completed implementation of the solution in 11 weeks. The First American team chose to enhance its implementation of Project Server 2003 by adding more reporting capabilities. The company used the reporting tools included with SQL Server 2000 to create a project status reporting database that helps PMOs to generate their required weekly reports more quickly. First American deployed this tool as an additional tab within Microsoft Office Project Web Access.

During the training sessions for Project Server 2003, some First American teams experienced delays in response time from the central servers in Texas when performing certain actions in Microsoft Office Project Professional 2003. For example, saving a three-line project plan from Dallas would take just five seconds, but from the company’s Santa Ana, California headquarters, it could take three minutes, and from India, it could take up to 12 minutes. This issue affected a minority of First American’s users who were accessing Project Server 2003 via Project Professional 2003 rather than Project Web Access. After consulting with Microsoft and Fujitsu, First American solved the problem by deploying Citrix Metaframe, which accelerated remote access speeds from Project Professional 2003.

Benefits

Improved Collaboration

Project Server 2003 has for the first time established a single repository for shared project plans and documents, accessible to authorized team members and business executives across First American Title Insurance Company’s IT offices. “The Microsoft Office EPM Solution has increased awareness across our organization, improving our planning and quality of work,” says Rondeau. “The consensus among users is that it has led to better communication overall.”

For example, during a recent conference call regarding a multiregional project, team members in California, Texas, Massachusetts, and India all accessed Project Server 2003 and pulled up the same project plan at the same time. In reviewing the plan together, the team discovered that several tasks were missing, projected durations were inaccurate, and dependencies were not accounted for. “Without that plain, simple visibility, the project would have failed,” says Rondeau.

The Microsoft Office EPM Solution has also facilitated the dissemination of best practices throughout First American Title’s IT department. “We now have a public folder set up for best practices, and people are using it,” says Rondeau. “One of our regions came to us and asked for training in our project management processes, and every bit of our methodology was already right there at its fingertips.”

Better Decision Making

Project Server 2003 has given First American a single, consolidated view of its project portfolio. And, the company’s project managers can use the Portfolio Analyzer tool to access critical information that was much more difficult to get before. “Portfolio Analyzer enables us to slice and dice the data however we need, such as to identify how much time an individual or team spent on a certain project,” explains Rondeau. “This helps us make much more accurate forecasts for future projects.”

With its graphical dashboard functionality, Project Server 2003 has also dramatically accelerated First American’s awareness of potentially costly problems. “When a project starts going astray, the indicators on our dashboard immediately turn yellow or red, so a project manager or business executive can jump right in and help get it back on track,” says Rondeau. “Before, we would have to wait for someone to tell us there was a problem.”

Improved Resource Utilization

Project Server 2003 has helped First American to balance its workload across resources and ensure that task assignments are appropriate. “Before, if one resource was working on five different projects, he or she might be assigned to 40 hours of work on one day, and there was no way of catching it,” says Rondeau. “At the same time, another resource could be sitting next door with no assignment that day. Project Server [2003] now gives us a method to assist managers in balancing our resources and alerting us when they are over- or under-deployed.”

Project Server 2003 also allows management to share resources across departments or regions. “We have people with particular expertise spread across various locations,” says Rondeau. “Project Server [2003] has the capabilities to help identify and deploy that intellectual capital within other teams, so there will be less of a learning curve and a shorter time to delivery on our projects.”

Rising Adoption

First American has not required any of its offices to adopt Project Server 2003 but finds that they are doing so voluntarily. The initial deployment included three of the company’s PMOs; two more joined several months later, and an additional two have requested to be added. “We already have more than 600 active users on Project Server [2003],” says Rondeau, “and now we are looking at adding approximately 100 more. Project Server [2003] is really catching on at First American. As one region has success with it, another one asks to join in.”

Fortunately, the Microsoft Office EPM Solution will be able to accommodate all of this growth. “We have 11 regions at First American Title Insurance Company, and Project Server [2003] has the extensibility and scalability to support all of them,” says Rondeau.

Meeting Strategic Objectives

After one year of implementation, Rondeau feels that the Microsoft Office EPM Solution is definitely helping to meet the strategic objectives of the business. “Our CIO has a list of 16 key objectives for us to meet,” she says. “Those objectives each translate into projects—of which we now have over 300. The increased efficiency and visibility that Project Server [2003] has given us are key components in our ability to manage and meet these goals.”

Rondeau adds that First American expects to reap even more benefits from the Microsoft Office EPM Solution in the coming year. “We have a new Vice President of Business Process Management, and among her goals is to utilize Project Server [2003] to its fullest extent,” Rondeau says. “We now have initiatives underway to increase our usage of time reporting, analysis tools, and resource forecasting. So, six months from now, we expect even more benefits out of Project Server [2003].”

Microsoft Office System

Microsoft Office is the business world's chosen environment for information work that provides the software, servers, and services that help you succeed by transforming information into impact.

For more information about Microsoft Office System, go to:

‌office

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| |Software and Services

Microsoft Office System

Microsoft Office Project Professional 2003

− Microsoft Office Project Server 2003

■ Microsoft Windows Server System

− Microsoft SQL Server 2000

− Microsoft Windows Server 2003 Standard Edition

■ Microsoft Office Enterprise Project Management (EPM) Solution |Technology

− Microsoft Office Project Web Access

− Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services

Hardware

■ 6 Compaq DL580 servers

■ 2 Compaq ProLiant DL360 servers

Partners

■ Fujitsu Consulting | |

"Project Server [2003] is really catching on at First American. As one region has success with it, another one asks to join in.”

Kathleen Rondeau, Manager of Business Process Management, First American Title Insurance Company

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© 2006 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY. Microsoft, the office logo, SharePoint, Windows, Windows Server, and Windows Server System are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Document published December 2005 | | |

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