For success on a software implementation project, you’ll need two kinds of “change champions.” Pre-implementation change champions put project infrastructure in place, obtain funding, and get the project rolling. Post-implementation change champions focus on end-user adoption and enhanced change management.

The article includes a list of attributes that must be understood for change champions to be successful. While you’ll rarely find all this knowledge within one individual, it’s important that the collective wisdom of your team of change agents includes proficiency in:

• The business processes they will implement;
• The skills required to drive change;
• Political savviness;
• How to incorporate user feedback into your plans and the delivered solution;
• How to sell the value of the implementation to your organization, and;
• Organized project planning and solution configuration to alleviate learning curve pains.

A key takeaway from the article is that effective communication is a vital skill that change agents must develop, and knowing your audience is the first step. Research must be conducted before you’ll be able to deliver on-target answers when you’re asked, “what’s in it for me?” Before you begin outbound communication about planned changes, utilize inbound communication. Ask your stakeholders what’s important to them and listen attentively, then map their existing pain points to your proposed solution. That’s how you’ll convince your organization that change is worth the cost and effort required.

Another takeaway is that fear can be overcome by presenting evidence of success. References from other firms in a similar industry, or that are similar in size or other details, will help convince your decision makers that the proposed solution will yield desired results. Beginning with a pilot project within one division or business unit will minimize disruption across the enterprise, provide helpful lessons learned, and deliver tangible ROI measurements that show the value of expanding change across the entire organization.

Contact Gaea today to learn how we can help you become a change champion in your industry.

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Primavera Unifier is now the university’s central repository for all CAPEX and OPEX spending throughout the construction-operation lifecycle. All campus capital spend (from inception to commissioning) and every facility (under construction and completed) is tracked in Unifier. Preventive and corrective work orders and all facility assets are tracked in Unifier’s Facilities and Asset Management (FAM) module.

“This 14-month project involved close coordination with multiple cross-functional partners within the university, and complex bidirectional integrations with Unifier,” said Jyotsna Bharadwaj, Gaea’s university project manager. “This implementation is the first and largest Unifier FAM solution with an active user base. Our process here will be used as a model for future implementations at higher-education institutions.”

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Arlington County is located across the Potomac river from Washington, D.C. Arlington Public Schools (APS) is the thirteenth-largest of Virginia’s 132 school divisions and has a total FY19 budget of more than $637M. APS includes 33 schools covering a population of 26 square miles and 225,200 people. Projected pre-K-12 enrollment for 2019 is 28,020.

The Challenge

The APS design and construction department wanted to replace their legacy project management information system (PMIS), Primavera Contract Management (PCM), with Primavera Unifier. Oracle officially ended support for PCM in October 2016. APS wanted the new system to serve as a unified, single-source-of-truth project management information system with a single-point-of-entry data repository. The new PMIS needed to handle project management activities related to project controls (including submittals, RFIs, meeting minutes, action items), project financials (budgets, commitments, payments), and document management.

PCM lacked the ability to host large project files, forcing APS to use additional software to manage most project documentation. Skysite, for example, was used to manage submittals, and caused effort duplication because the submittal workflow was managed in PCM while the actual submittal file was in Skysite.

The Solution

APS hired Gaea for the end-to-end Primavera Unifier implementation, including Unifier Project Controls and Cost Controls, and migration of PCM data and reports into Unifier. Gaea led the project, including discovery, definition of 36 business processes, configuration, and numerous out-of-the-box (OOTB) reports. The entire project spanned eight months from start to finish, including three months of data migration.

Gaea and APS staff managed the project. Gaea developed scripts to extract more than 87 gigabytes of data from PCM and Skysite and migrated the data. 71,000 records from 20 projects (10 active, 10 completed) were migrated from PCM to Unifier. Most of the legacy system financial information was imported into Unifier through .csv templates Gaea provided to APS.

The APS core team and project managers did extensive validation and back checks on the migrated data. Once data validation was completed, APS gave Gaea the go-ahead to migrate to the newly implemented system. Gaea trained APS staff with role-based training for CMAs, AEs, CMRs, and GCs along with a train-the-trainer approach for the APS core team.

The new APS project information management system is used to manage more than $200M in development, renovation, and expansion projects for its schools and technology centers. Ten projects are currently active. Congratulations to everyone at APS and Gaea whose hard work and dedication was instrumental in the making the Arlington Public Schools Unifier implementation project a huge success!

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Gaea recommends focusing on five key PPM solution components: analytics, project ROI, resource management, standards and automation, and integration.

1. Leverage analytics
The best performers in Aberdeen’s study were twice as likely to utilize analytics tools integrated with their PPM system to support wise decision making.

2. Select and execute projects that deliver the greatest ROI
Every project requested across an enterprise cannot be executed. A great PPM system will help determine the potential ROI of each project in your organization’s portfolio, prioritize those projects, and then help execute them on time and on budget.

3. Intelligently manage all resources
No firm has unlimited resources, whether they’re human or materials. Organizations need to be able view and assign resources across their entire portfolio of projects to ensure optimal, prioritized performance.

4. Enable repeatable success through standards and automation
Utilize PPM system best-practice capabilities, tailored to fit your organization, to streamline operations, speed execution, and facilitate collaboration.

5. Integrate for optimal reporting and proactive management
An integrated enterprise PPM system that manages costs and execution not only provides one source of truth for reporting, it enables proactive management. Don’t wait to run reports to determine project health. Your PPM system should alert you whenever certain conditions arise, enabling action to avoid cost overruns.

Contact Gaea today to learn how we can help you implement, integrate, and optimize a PPM solution that will empower you to become a leader in your industry.

Download the full Aberdeen report from Oracle’s website.

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Established in 1834, Milwaukee County is the most populous county in Wisconsin and the 45th most populous in the United States, with approximately 951,000 residents as of 2016.

The Milwaukee County Architecture Engineering and Environmental Services section (AE&ES) manages an average of 250 to 300 capital projects and launches 50 to 80 new projects each year, a total fiscal responsibility of $300M to $400M for the entire portfolio. Major project categories include highways, mass transit, airports, and environmental.

The Challenge

Since 1996, AE&ES used Oracle Primavera Contract Management (PCM) on-premise to manage its capital projects. PCM reached its official end of life in October 2016. County wanted to replace the existing PCM solution with Oracle Primavera Unifier to improve the AE&ES capital project management process, to centralize and standardize management of capital portfolio projects, and to provide improved reporting capabilities on a cloud-based, supported, stable platform.

The Solution

Milwaukee County hired Gaea for the end-to-end Primavera Unifier implementation, including requirements definition, design, configuration, testing, installation, and training. Gaea led the project, including discovery work, definition of 45 business processes, and configuration work, and County provided project management and subject-matter expertise to support the process.

Gaea and County staff collaboratively managed the project. Gaea led the business requirements analysis and documentation process with County in a supporting role. Gaea trained County staff with a train-the-trainer approach.

“Milwaukee County greatly appreciated Gaea’s expertise and confidence implementing Primavera Unifier and migrating County from PCM to Unifier. Gaea’s methodology assessed County business processes and used a multi-stage, iterative approach that leveraged their knowledge and understanding of how businesses operate, what was working, and what needed improvement.”

“Gaea worked collaboratively with County to ensure that the Unifier solution is holistic, adoptable, scalable, and sustainable. County immediately realized value from Gaea’s experience around best practices, functional and technical knowledge of Primavera Unifier, and gained further business value by using Gaea as the sole implementation consulting firm.” – Greg High, Milwaukee County, Director AE&ES

Congratulations to everyone at County and Gaea whose hard work and dedication was instrumental in making the Milwaukee County project a huge success!

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About LBCC

LBCC is a community college founded in 1927, with two campuses in Long Beach, California. LBCC currently has almost 25,000 students enrolled across 820 courses and 3,148 class sections. The two campuses cover 142.1 acres and employ more than 1,600 full-time and part-time staff and faculty.

The Challenge

During our assessment, we reviewed LBCC’s existing project management information system (PMIS), and met with the LBCC construction and program management team of approximately 20 people. LBCC’S PMIS was made up of several disconnected systems, including Oracle Primavera Contract Management (PCM) for project controls, PeopleSoft (ERP), Primavera P6 for scheduling. Other peripheral systems included email, Word, Excel, and hard copies of documents.

Our analysis revealed the lack of an integrated, end-to-end solution. The results? Low visibility, data-entry errors, data silos, redundant information, inconsistent coding, inconsistent storage, and duplication of work. In addition, a serious bottleneck was created by multiple users submitting data to a single system administrator for entry.

During discovery, the construction management (CM) team stated that the current system is operating at approximately 20% efficiency when compared to a fully-integrated, coded, and connected system with effective data entry and workflow processes. If a perfect system score is 100%, the goal of the LBCC CM team was to improve their PMIS to at least 65% through available means. The general consensus of comments related to challenge areas was the need to improve standardization of business processes (BPs) and system access. Improvement of these key fundamentals was required for timely data gathering, to support key performance indicators (KPIs) across management levels, and to increase and add business efficiency.

The Solution

Our recommendations covered several areas. One, a revision of current LBCC systems and processes in order to maximize productivity and reduce errors. Two, a potential new project management system and related processes that would enhance the ability of LBCC to manage projects and overcome current system limitations. And three, integrations and processes designed to provide end-to-end system support for program and project management.

LBCC could upgrade from PCM 13.0 to 14.xx under their Oracle maintenance plan, or to select another system. Our post-assessment report included additional recommendations for LBCC. By migrating from PCM to Unifier, LBCC would have a future-proof project management solution (PCM support ended in April 2016). LBCC would also have additional functionality that would prove to be very valuable in many areas as they moved forward.

Further performance increases were also recommended, including several integrations:

• integration with PeopleSoft (cost control)
• integration between PeopleSoft and the cost management system (document control), and
• integrating contract and financial management (cost control).

The fully-integrated system recommended by Gaea gives LBCC total visibility, maximum efficiency, and reduces manual processes and errors by a significant margin.

U.S. Communities for the Best Project Management Information System Pricing

In order to secure the best pricing for LBCC and to streamline the contract process, we leveraged our partnership with DLT Solutions and U.S. Communities. Another win/win solution for another higher learning institution!

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