Case Study:
CA-DHHS oversees the Health and Human Services for the state of California, including the $4.6 billion budget of Medicaid Home and Community Services. As government captains of projects, programs, and initiatives supporting child welfare, mental health services, and centers for development, health education, and social services, getting their projects running smoothly is a big deal.
Business Situation
To improve transparency, success, and quality of the numerous projects, programs, and portfolio initiatives that they oversee, CA-DHHS looked to leverage a better system. They needed a project tracking, scheduling, and portfolio/resource workload management system for its different agencies, including the Department of Development Services (CA-DDS).
Solution Delivered
Advisicon met with key stakeholders and mapped out the core requirements needed to simplify and standardize demand (current and future projects) to their resource capacity and project skillsets/resources. For their government project management needs, Project Online fit all their criteria and was implemented, along with end user training, administration coaching, and integration with Office 365’s supporting and coloration tools. Ultimately, all their information was driven to dashboards and drill down reports using Power BI.
Benefits Received
We created a streamlined planning, forecasting, and project tracking system for CA-DHHS and CA-DDS that provided enterprise level visibility, accountability, and real-time reporting based on progressing work and schedules. All this was connecting to a central global resource pool for early visibility to resource and capacity shortfalls—helping to prevent or address schedule slippages before they occurred. By leveraging the Microsoft stack, they increased team collaboration through centralization of documents & artifacts and made it easier to replicate projects and the project success they saw in the past.
The Agency Today
The agency today is firmly rooted on the growing M365 and Power Platform to help automate, track, and report project progress. Simultaneously, they use the same tools to plan and forecast future work and see the impacts of those projects against their existing in-flight portfolio initiatives. The COVID-19 pandemic pushed their system to reprioritize work, take on new actions, and create a modern vaccine delivery system. Through the pandemic, they continue to look forward in other ways, in summer 2021 releasing their first-ever Master Plan for Aging considering the massive age bubble of 10.8 million Californians reaching age 60+ by 2030.
