Case Studies: Innotas Customer Success Stories
“We chose Innotas because it was the best overall value. It really gave us the most functionality, scalability, and support in comparison with the other vendors we evaluated. And because Innotas is cloud-based, we save on infrastructure costs—which is crucial when budgets are going down.”
- Robert Pietras
Manager, Project Management Office
Manager, Project Management Office
State of North Carolina Office of Information Technology Services: Greater visibility, optimized IT processes, and quick ROI with Innotas PPM
The State of North Carolina Office of Information Technology Services, with 500 employees, opened a Project Management Office (PMO) three and a half years ago. The PMO’s 15 seasoned project management professionals lead a variety of agency IT projects and fulfill the office’s mission to boost IT efficiency, cut costs, and improve project delivery in terms of time and budget.
Challenge: Manage IT projects and resources for ten state agencies effectively and efficiently
The PMO was presented with a charter to establish transparency and visibility into the state’s project and application portfolios, including fixing challenges such as:
- Gaining control of unapproved projects; some of which were over budget and overdue, and many others that were not visible to top management.
- Consolidation of basic governance processes, multiple spreadsheets, and basic project management software.
- Governance of IT projects and resources through an integrated IT project portfolio management system as a single source of truth.
The initial goal of the solution would be to capture and maintain all project and portfolio details—with an ultimate goal of tracking all resources across the agency on both a project and non-project basis.
Solution: Innotas Cloud Solutions for IT Management helps create efficiencies, cost savings, and effective decision-making
According to Robert Pietras, Manager of the Project Management Office, there were three requirements for the project portfolio management solution:
- Robust project and application portfolio management functionality that would drive efficiencies and visibility.
- Scalability in order to address capacity increases due to legislative changes.
- Superior post-sales service and implementation support.
After evaluating 15 vendors that included SaaS, hosted, and on-premise solutions, a six-member evaluation team found the cloud-based Innotas IT Governance solution—including its Project Portfolio Management (PPM) and Application Portfolio Management (APM) capabilities—to be the clear choice.
Results: Significant productivity gains and cost savings achieved through process optimization
When the PMO first implemented Innotas, only 12 people were using it. But now, there are 200 registered users.
- The new dashboards in the Innotas Spring Release allow the PMO to immediately increase productivity. Dashboards show all information broken down on a project or phase basis. Additionally, project managers can access these dashboards in one place in real time.
- The PMO has created an investment review board to score projects. Once the scoring is complete, the PMO can use Innotas to show how the projects fall into strategic quadrants.
- The PMO also benefits from Innotas by tracking server procurement processes. Historically, procuring servers was time consuming. By using Innotas, the PMO discovered that there were 151 detailed tasks to complete the procurement. Armed with this new information, the state improved and accelerated the procurement process.
The additional results after implementing Innotas have been impressive, including:
- Productivity gains: Improved monthly status reporting through Innotas dashboards and other tools has helped the PMO eliminate more than 1,500 hours per year spent developing dashboards manually for a yearly savings of more than $129,000.
- Project transparency: Understanding the true value of IT projects enables better decisions on which projects should be continued.
- Process improvement through information: Innotas has enabled IT to improve the time it takes to procure servers.
- One-stop shopping: Innotas IT Governance also includes application portfolio management, which will enable the PMO to tackle the application side when it’s ready.
