LMI Process Improvement Initiative Consolidates Customer PPM Capabilities

When selecting Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) tools, one size does not fit all. With the varying missions and complexities within different federal agencies, choosing the right PPM tool requires expertise in PPM and business process improvement. LMI’s team of trained and experienced practitioners are experts in these processes and help our federal clients better understand their own needs while bringing efficiency and cost savings to their operations. As evidenced by our past performance, we can implement the right tool for any customer.

In 2019, LMI proposed a process improvement initiative for one of our customers to standardize and automate finance and budget processes across the organization. Our team first worked with the agency to compile a list of detailed requirements (i.e., functional, tools, technical) that the selected software would need to meet to be considered for implementation. Once the requirements vetting was completed, we conducted thorough market research of 158 different PPM tools, capturing each respective software’s capabilities and functionality. After completing analysis and participating in vendor demonstrations, our team recommended the right PPM tool for the agency to implement.

The following figure highlights the key needs of the agency that we analyzed and how they were met by the selected PPM tool.

Business Needs: about $4 billion per year agency spending; needs to recognize and spend their budget allocation. Agency leadership needs to understand financials in real time, on demand. Current process relies on data being stored on local desktops. Solution: The PPM tool implemented a daily data transfer from SAP, allowing the agency to recognize cleared spend activities faster. The tool provided 24/7 access to spending information for all programs across the agency, including information received from SAP. Project Management Tool Capabilities: Cost, Requirements, Schedule, Resource Management. Migrate existing project management tool capabilities into the chosen PPM tool to increase visibility into project management-related activities. Replace real estate and environmental capabilities. Solution: the PPM tool team activities saved the organization about $600,000 to 700,000. The PPM tool team worked with agency staff to determine how the previous tool had been utilized and then configured existing capabilities or developed new ones to meet or exceed those requirements. Automate and quickly create management, acquisition, and finance reports. The team leveraged the PPM tool’s reporting functionality and ability to integrate with Power Business Intelligence to automate reports, relieving the stress of manual reporting.

Benefits to Our Client

With this increased visibility into their budget, agency leadership was able to see under-execution in their spend plans, allowing them to move financial resources to ensure their allocated funds were appropriately dispersed. For Fiscal Year (FY) 2022, the agency obligated over 99.9% of their funding, a significant improvement over previous FYs.
Previous reports were completed via a manual process (i.e., monthly, quarterly, yearly) which was very labor intensive. The LMI team leveraged the PPM tool and Power BI to automate many of these reports, saving cost and time across the agency
The PPM implementation was so successful that the agency is migrating similar Project Management capabilities in other tools to the selected system, retiring these other systems and reducing ongoing system maintenance costs.
Additionally, the agency has requested that LMI develop a contract life cycle module within the PPM tool to provide leadership with visibility into all aspects of contracts, purchase requests, contract financial information, and contract timeframes. Current processes for these activities include distributed, spreadsheet-based, manual reporting capabilities. The new module will provide an aggregated vie for real-time recognition and reporting of all aspects of contract activities.
Previously, programs were conducting quarterly financial reporting to agency leadership. Leveraging the new PPM tool, LMI improved the program reporting process to reduce briefing times from approximately 1 hour per program to 15 minutes per program. This freed up time for leadership and program managers to focus on other projects and initiatives.

If your organization lacks a consolidated resource to support portfolio, program, and project management capabilities, LMI’s team of PPM subject matter experts can help find the right tool. To learn more, please contact Vickie Sanchez.