Situation
Freddie Mac is a stockholder-owned corporation chartered by Congress in 1970 to keep money flowing to mortgage lenders in support of homeownership and rental housing. The company’s mission is straight-forward – stabilize the nation’s mortgage markets and expand opportunities for home ownership and affordable rental housing. Headquartered in McLean, Virginia, Freddie Mac has approximately 4,400 employees.
In addition to being a large organization with numerous projects across many departments and utilizing resources across the company, began looking for a product to better meet their unique project management needs.
Task
Freddie Mac needed to adopt a project management tool which would allow them to accomplish the following:
- Quickly and accurately determine the status of projects related to a specific corporate-level initiative
- Analyze and identify trends and problem areas within projects and among projects
- Better understand the effects of staffing and scheduling changes, and provide answers to questions relating to resource utilization and skill assessment
- Perform in-depth reporting and analysis against completed projects, in-progress projects, and resource availability
- Repeat best practices in project management
- Meet a variety of unique reporting requirements, including reports necessary for legal audits
Action
To best meet Freddie Mac’s stated objectives, WiserWulff guided the design, configuration and implementation of a Microsoft Project environment.
The implementation process began with a complete assessment of the current Freddie Mac environment, as well as gathering, documenting and reviewing the requirements needed to configure and implement the Microsoft Project environment. Through this process, WiserWulff was able to gain a better understanding of Freddie Mac’s key project planning, executing and control functions so that those requirements could be translated into detailed design points for software configuration and implementation.
The next step in the implementation process was to install Microsoft Project and Microsoft Project Server. Key to the success of the installation process was teaching the Freddie Mac Server Administrator how to implement, configure and support Project Server.
The Microsoft Project Pilot Solution was configured based upon the requirements gathered at the beginning of the implementation process. WiserWulff built and configured Freddie Mac’s solution in its development lab, and later installed the configured solution into Freddie Mac’s environment. The configured solution included the following:
- Configuration of several Project Center views to provide easy delivery of key Project Management data to stakeholders
- Configuration of several Web Access project-level views
- Configuration of several Project Professional project-level reports
- Definition of custom fields and custom outline codes to support graphical indicator metrics and Phase/Gate milestones
- Definition of several Risk/Issue reports
- Initial limited population of the global resource pool
- Definition of two Microsoft Project templates
Following acceptance of the pilot solution configuration, the pilot was installed at Freddie Mac’s site. Once the pilot solution was successfully installed, training became the engagement focus. WiserWulff provided in-depth training for Freddie Mac project managers, team members and stakeholders.
Detailed technical and end-user support was provided over a three-week period to assist those using the Freddie Mac project management solution. This support, which ensured the most effective use of the Microsoft Project solution, included the following activities:
- Collection of end user feedback concerning problems, and design improvement suggestions
- Fine-tuning the solution
- Assisting and mentoring Freddie Mac staff on the use and operation of the solution
- General consulting on Project Management processes, procedures, and tools
Benefits
Because of the thoroughness of the requirements gathering and pilot implementation processes, Freddie Mac was able to meet their originally stated objectives. As a result of this Microsoft Project implementation, the company has achieved the following:
- More objectivity in project status reporting
- Better utilization of existing resources
- More efficiently run projects based on the development and review of project management best practices