Case Studies: Innotas Customer Success Stories

University of Southern Mississippi: IT Governance is... Priority One!

Organization

The University of Southern Mississippi is a comprehensive doctoral and research intensive university. Founded in 1910, the vision of The University of Southern Mississippi is to be a leading university in engaging and empowering individuals to transform lives and communities. Southern Miss serves nearly 16,000 students on the main campus in Hattiesburg, Miss., and at five teaching and research sites on the Mississippi Gulf Coast. Southern Miss is proud of their academic tradition of excellence and is committed to sustaining a tradition of integrity and quality enhancement - these tenets are the foundation of the operations of teaching, public service, research and learning.

Business Opportunity

The central IT department (iTech) at Southern Miss searched for a solution that would allow work to be scheduled, based on resource capacity, labor demands and project priorities. A view of the entire portfolio was the nexus of the evaluation for an IT Governance Project Portfolio Management (PPM) solution.

• Gain visibility into where iTech resources were spending their time and how much time was available to schedule teams for project work.
• Streamline the sustaining and project work from several different "stove pipe" operations into one Project Management Office (PMO) intake process.
• Improve the Governance process by understanding the impact of decisions made during project prioritization.

Solution

On-Demand IT Governance from Innotas to address the requirements for planning, scheduling, and prioritizing requests from various departments at the University.

• Best practice stage-gate approvals embedded in the request management module provided the mechanism to effectively begin the prioritization of iTech's workload.
• The use of Innotas' tightly integrated time tracking module gave iTech the foundation for understanding the operational resource utilization versus the project resources, and how they were being deployed.
• Complete inventory of projects provided visibility to all work being performed by iTech.
• Quality decisions based on facts and data were being made in a more timely manner with the use of Innotas' resource management.

Results and Benefits

• Minimized "firefighting" activities by focusing work efforts, based on improved request prioritization and faster decision making.
• Gained a clear understanding of schedules and resource capacity by capturing all project labor demand and resource allocations against operational activity in a centralized location.
• Allowed the PMO to ensure all projects are accurately scored for priority and initiation of work.
• Successfully rolled out two major projects to serve the student and faculty communities, while achieving significant reductions in infrastructure maintenance costs:
  • CampusHub - a new portal for students, faculty, and staff to access the various in-house applications
  • Eagle Apps - student access to improved email, calendaring, and office applications
• Improved service to the University community as a whole by providing a centralized repository for project intake and management.
• Time tracking for 100 users was implemented in less than 30 days.