Purdue University Leverages Planview PPM Pro Data Insights to Proactively Inform Stakeholders

Founded in 1869, Purdue University is a top public research institution located in West Lafayette, Indiana with nearly 17,000 faculty and staff support approximately 41,000 graduate, undergraduate and professional students. The university’s project management office (PMO) was created in 2015 to bring structure and organization to IT project management. It consists of 14 full-time project managers and three staff members who support portfolio management and reporting.

The PMO at Purdue University regularly supports between 400 and 500 projects at any given time. The tools used to manage these projects varied widely with no integration, therefore no real visibility into project statuses, costs, dates, or resource capacity. Without reliable reporting, business leaders had little to work with when it came to making and validating key business decisions.

A priority was set to find a solution that would improve data quality, ensure consistency and enforce adherence to specific governance policies. The end-goal was to get reliable, timely data into the hands of decision-makers, leaders, and project stakeholders via regular, consistent status reporting.

Purdue has utilized Planview® PPM Pro for project management and relies on the various reports in its dashboard to inform most IT decisions. “Planview PPM Pro fills the gap between the dispersed data and the people who need it,” says Michelle Bates, director of the PMO at Purdue. “Planview PPM Pro enables us to generate high-level to granular-level reports specific to the user so the people who need the data have the data without having to dig for it.”

Planview PPM Pro serves as Purdue’s single source of record, providing project data that stakeholders, from project managers up to the executives, need to monitor projects and glean insights helping them understand and better prioritize the work that will drive the university’s goals and initiatives. Depending on the user, reports can be customized to display exactly what each user cares most about, eliminating the practice of generating irrelevant reports no one uses.

The first step Purdue took before deploying Planview PPM Pro was to talk to business leaders and users of reports to find out what they each wanted. “We didn’t just want to dump a bunch of data out there,” Bates says. “It was important for us to deliver the right information to the right people.”

The Planview PPM Pro reports and dashboard provides Purdue with decision-driving data and information that increase data quality and provides drill-down details, such as the project status reports that roll-up critical project information such as milestones, hours and costs, status detail, and all issues and risks associated with each project. “In the project status report is the executive-level summary as well as the breakdown of detailed information,” explains Bates. “Viewers get the data they need at the level of detail that’s helpful to them.”

A key report to the business is the “executive level report”, a collection of top projects based on visibility, funding, high risk or strategic effort. The cost performance and scheduled performance indexes give senior leadership the ability to see which projects due dates will be missed so they can ask the questions to get to the bottom of the “why.”

Planview PPM Pro has given Purdue:

• A consolidated view of data across the IT organization
• Multiple reports and dashboards with customizable levels of detail
• Highly-relevant reports that can be easily shared with users and non-users of Planview PPM Pro
• Data-backed insights that stakeholders can trust to make decisions