About IT Assist

IT Assist is part of the Department of Finance and Personnel in Northern Ireland.

IT Assist provides IT support for email, desktop, helpdesk and network services across the Northern Ireland Civil Service (NICS) and supports 18,300 users across 11 Government departments.

IT Assist has a Project Management Office which is responsible developing its programme and project management skills and practices.

The Challenge

IT Assist manage a portfolio of projects which can number up to 60 at any one time. The aim of the programme is to create a common technical infrastructure needed for centralised support, service and customer management regimes. Many of the projects are interdependent and IT Assist realised that strong programme and project management skills would be needed to deliver the desired results.

To complement its enhanced Portfolio and Project Management (PPM) maturity, IT Assist wished to implement PPM software that would:

• Be simple and intuitive to use
• Provide a centralised location for all project information
• Enforce their internal project management methodology
• Provide a clear view of critical paths within projects and programmes
• Easily identify projects behind schedule with information readily available to allow the appropriate actions to be taken
• Effective management of resources
• Project financial control and reporting
• Support other programmes and projects across NICS

Overall, the PPM software needed to provide IT Assist with the best value for money in meeting its unique needs.

Our Solution

Following a thorough tender process, IT Assist chose to implement ProjectVision, Cora System’s web-based project and portfolio management system.

ProjectVision comprehensive feature set met all of IT Assist’s specifications and requirements without the need for any customisation. ProjectVision allows IT Assist project teams to set up programmes and projects very easily and update the information with minimum training.

Projects are grouped into relevant programmes matching IT Assist’s corporate structure providing logical visibility of work and roll-up reporting capability across the entire organisation. All of IT Assist’s project team are set up as resources on ProjectVision. Project managers allocate tasks to these resources allowing resource utilisation to be monitored.

Due to the complex nature of the IT Assist programme, it was important that ProjectVision allowed a view of inter-project dependencies to ensure that effect of project delays on the overall programme could be assessed quickly and the appropriate action taken.

The full range of reports allows users to view activity from the programme level down through project and task information to quickly identify issues.  ProjectVision also allows IT Assist to build a custom set of reports to suit all audiences from project specific meetings to single views of the overall IT Assist programme for management meetings.

Benefits to IT Assist

IT Assist can simply access all programme and project information in their portfolio and can easily identify projects that are behind schedule. Alerting key staff of project difficulties ensures that their projects are delivered on time.

The extensive reporting capability of ProjectVision allows IT Assist Management to keep up to date with the latest project information saving time and therefore money in collating information for monthly reports.

The management of resources has been simplified which allows the workload of resources to be monitored across all projects and ensures effective use of resources.

The familiar, intuitive and simple user interface ensures minimum training for users, saving time and building user loyalty to ensure that IT Assist get best value for money.

The advantage of using proven, off-the-shelf PPM software is that it allowed IT Assist to deploy and implement the solution in a timely manner, while ensuring the guaranteed success of the project.