Promote your project management portal for better staff buy-in

A new project management portal—Web-based tool for sharing information, entering progress, receiving assignments and collaborating through a common interface—will take your organization to the next level of efficiency. However, without staff buy-in, your portal can never succeed.

By proactively working with your staff to understand the benefits and to use the new system correctly, you will help your organization achieve its goals and improve overall project performance.

Many companies have noticed another significant benefit from using a portal: Staff members have a better sense of involvement in the whole project. Because they now can see their own responsibilities, as well as their impact on the entire project, they often become more invested in the project's success.

Sperry Marine

A Charlottesville, Va., USA-based business unit of the global aerospace and defense giant Northrop Grumman Corp., Sperry Marine has been using its project management portal to respond to requests for proposals and to help manage the resulting projects for 18 months. Global team members use the portal for document control and project collaboration. Many also are using the portal to view the project schedule, manage action items and access other data. Information about each project is documented and can be accessed from one location. People with access to the project can see who created a project document, when it was uploaded, who changed it and the revision history. There's no doubt the portal is useful, but it took time to get the team to realize the benefits.

To get funding, Thea Yancey, manager of the proposal team with Sperry Marine, educated the executives on the value of implementing a project portal and then kept them informed of the value after the rollout. “I made it a point to ask the executives what kind of information they wanted to see so that we could make sure they could access it through the portal.”

Sperry then instituted a phased project portal rollout by introducing the system only for managing proposals—albeit in multiple locations—and by initially turning off some functions. Starting out small, Yancey says, gave people time to master a few functions at a time. Users also were allowed to keep duplicates of their documents as long as they also placed them on the portal. This gradual introduction gave team members confidence in the system, which led to more compliance.

PORTAL DOS AND DON'TS

Training also proved important to acceptance. “While many found the portal fairly intuitive and the online help easy to use, there are some people who are just more comfortable when they've received formal training,” Yancey says. “We set up two-hour sessions to go over the highlights of the system, and people would walk out of the training saying, ‘This is really neat. I can't wait to set up some projects.’”

Despite the careful rollout and training, Yancey says there still is the occasional problem of people not using the portal consistently. In those cases, the manager may need to enforce usage. “Some people adapt fairly quickly, some people grudgingly, and some people don't adapt well at all,” Yancey says. “This puts the onus back on the manager to make sure people are using the portal every day and address the problem if they're not. Unless somebody cares about and uses the data on a regular basis, it's just another database that nobody uses.”

People who were excited about the portal and had a good experience using it in the pilot projects served as “ambassadors” and helped bring different project teams on board, Yancey says. “The goal is for each new project team to kickoff with a two-hour portal training session.”

Yancey also agrees that the timing of the rollout is important. “It's key to introduce the portal at the beginning of a project, which I learned from experience,” she says. “The groups I tried to bring into the portal midstream during a proposal already had their way of doing things and didn't want to change. It's also key to get the team together and explain how you want them to use the portal for project execution, because I've found that it really isn't obvious to a lot of people.”

LESSON LEARNED: Back your benefit statements with specific examples when you're trying to show people how the portal will improve their productivity. Continue to monitor for timely examples of the portal's role in avoiding delays or confusion.

Boeing

At a Pennsylvania Boeing assembly plant, mechanics and assembly workers on the shop floor use a project portal to access the latest designs and instructions and to enter their progress as they assemble military helicopters using other software in conjunction with the portal. The portal is replacing a paper-based system, and, for some of the workers, this is their first exposure to personal computers. In this instance, basic PC and portal training, the user interface, ergonomics, simplicity and fast hardware are key to gaining acceptance.

One of the critical aspects of automating the existing manual processes was coming up with a simple user interface with bold color indicators. The interface was designed to allow the users to become comfortable with one or two parts of the system initially, which made it easier for them to understand the other parts of the system. The object was to get them to think as they interacted with the portal.

In addition to portal training, Boeing conducted basic PC literacy training. “Some of our shop floor workers had no computer experience whatsoever,” says Project Manager Ed Mytych. “We found that it paid off to have a basic PC literacy skill class during which we brought people in off the shop floor into a classroom setting.” The subsequent project portal classroom training was more of an exposure to the new system, whereas the real training took place on the shop floor.

Boeing rolled out the portal to a select group whose supervisor was willing to accept a new electronic system. “This particular supervisor felt very comfortable accepting new technology and wasn't afraid of it,” Mytych says. “If the supervisor is sold on it, staff will be, too.”

Still, there were challenges. “The pilot exposed some deficiencies in our processes and how people would use the electronic system versus paper,” Mytych says. “For example, there were a few people who had trouble double clicking, so we made sure that most operations were initiated with a single click.”

By the time the second version was introduced, Boeing had addressed many of the deficiencies identified in the pilot program, believing that they could take care of the remaining issues with a follow-up release after the system was put into use. That turned out to be a mistake, according to Mytych. “The deficiencies were much more significant—at least in the perception of the users—than we thought,” he says. “As a result, we ended up not getting total acceptance until we addressed them. Once we did, instead of us having to push the portal, we were being sought out.”

To give people time to become comfortable with the electronic system, Boeing left the paper system in place. “Eventually people gain confidence in the portal, then they stop replying on the paper and it goes away,” Mytych says.

In hindsight, Mytych says he would have identified those critical issues for the users that might have prevented earlier or more widespread acceptance. For Boeing, this might have included more prototyping in an out-of-shop environment and ergonomic studies.

LESSON LEARNED: If the portal is electronically interfaced with legacy systems, make sure it works flawlessly before you introduce it to the staff. Fixing a few key limitations, which seemed very minor to the project portal development team, makes a world of difference in acceptance by users.

Sierra Nevada Corp.

Sierra Nevada Corp. (SNC), a Sparks, Nev., USA-based provider of electronic systems, software and instruments to the aerospace and defense industry, implemented its project portal to elevate project visibility to company executives, project leaders and teams, as well as customers. “We had the staff buy-in discussion a lot, but for us the staff buy-in ultimately came because our top executive management pushed the portal and continues to support it,” says Connie Luna, SNC senior program controls manager.

SNC rolled out its project portal in its corporate headquarters and subsidiaries at the same time. “We didn't want to confuse anyone looking at reports through our portal by having only partial data included, so we did everything at one time,” Luna says. “We were, however, careful to time the rollout at a specific time of the month so that it didn't interfere with program updates, meetings and financial reviews.”

Luna says the biggest hurdle was getting staff comfortable using the software. “In addition to training new users, we do in-house training twice a year on the project management system, particularly when there are changes to the software,” she says. People are introduced gradually to a tool or capability that they may not be using to its best advantage.

Today, SNC holds some of its monthly program reviews in the project portal. If a program hasn't been updated, it's very clear to everyone and the program manager has to address the issue then and there with the executive team. Moreover, all of SNC's resource projections are done in the project management system, so if a program is not in the system, program managers don't get the resources they're requesting.

SNC executives recognized the benefits of the portal early on and prove it by using it daily. According to Luna, SNC's chief executive officer (CEO) logs in every day to review programs in progress and locate specific information. “If there's a program that has some issues with schedule or cost, our executives can access the briefing charts in the portal and find out the root cause and the recovery plan,” Luna says. “That helps in dealing with customer questions quicker, which is a huge asset.”

The SNC executive team also uses the portal during customer and potential customer site visits. “It is common for our CEO to pull up the project portal and show customers how we manage and report our programs, and demonstrate how accessible the information is to our executive team, human resources and the program managers and teams,” she says. “That's a huge benefit to the customer, and they recognize it.”

Other executives access the portal only during monthly reviews, while SNC's human resources department uses the portal to keep track of resource requirements. “By accessing the project portal, HR knows if they will need to hire people or if there's a problem with coverage on some programs,” Luna says.

LESSON LEARNED: Look at all portal options; choose the one that most closely fits the requirements. Get support from management before you move forward. Have a good implementation and rollout schedule, and stick to it. PM

Dan Patterson, Ph.D., PMP, is product manager of WelcomHome, Welcom's Web-based project management portal, and has more than nine years of project management experience. His expertise includes Web-based project management applications, construction planning and control, and the use of artificial intelligence for planning.