Case Study: American Red Cross
The American Red Cross wrestled with large volumes of work that made it difficult to accurately plan, track, and forecast delivery dates and timelines. By leveraging Microsoft Project PPM Toolsets along with training and support, they were able to establish simpler, centralized views for delivering project results. The ARC was able to shift to become more agile in project delivery and leverage BI & analytics for predictive forecasting and planning.
Business Situation
As a growing nonprofit, the American Red Cross had more to do than ever before. They struggled with over budget and late projects, needing a way to gain better visibility of their expanding workload of projects so they could stay on track and within cost. Without a central documentation platform, they couldn’t view historical project information or analyze lessons learned, cutting their forecasting abilities to practically zero.
Solution Delivered
After conferring with and assessing the organization’s needs, Advisicon helped deploy, set up, configure, and train end-users on Microsoft Project PPM and SharePoint. They were then connected as an enterprise to a central resource pool, so all work, tasks, and deliverables were visible, and the documentation related to each project was stored in a connected SharePoint site.
Benefits Received
By connecting work, tasks, deliverables, and projects to the centralized resource pool, we gave instant visibility, across all projects, to resource or team work assignments. Centralizing everything related to projects, a massive database was created for their organization— ensuring that information was available to anyone, anytime. As a direct result of this, collaboration capabilities were boosted exponentially.
Gaining the ability to forecast out 120 days enables the Red Cross to identify potential schedule slippage and/or issues & risks. They’re now better equipped to avoid pitfalls and stay aligned to project timetables.
The Company Today
The American Red Cross shelters, feeds, and provides emotional support to victims of disasters. They supply about 40% of the nation’s blood, teach skills that save lives, provide international humanitarian aid, and support military members and their families. Importantly, when the COVID-19 pandemic hit, the ARC’s system was prepared to implement a new project: testing blood donors for COVID antibodies and providing their plasma to help the most critical patients fighting the virus.
