Organization Profile

Based in Sioux Falls, Sanford Health is a nonfor- profit health care delivery system composed of hospitals, clinics, licensed practitioners and clinical research centers at over 150 facilities across South Dakota and the surrounding states.

With over 10,000 employees, it is the largest healthcare system provider between Denver, CO and the Mayo Clinic in Rochester.

Challenge

The Information Technology department at Sanford Health needed a more formal workflow process for defining and approving projects.

Without any uniform management tools between various department teams, tracking project throughput, updating project status and setting target dates was a manual process, and equated to additional hours spent every work week across the entire IT department.

“We noticed that we lacked the consistency for how projects were managed and wanted to implement a more disciplined approach of establishing timelines, tracking issues and managing resources.” says Scott Hansen, Project Manager in the IT department of Sanford Health.

Solution

With cost and application flexibility being the most important deciding factors, a number of project management tools were evaluated. “Easy Projects .NET was chosen as the most uniform yet flexible solution, due to its ease of use, automated batch tools and the ability to purchase the source code for custom modifications.” says Scott.

“While searching for a uniform tool to assist with our project management and approval process, EP became the clear choice.” adds Steve Thompson, Director of Information Technology. “EP fit within our cost requirements and the ease of implementation, wide array of features and ability to customize the application to fit our specifc needs are very important to us.”

Implementation

A full scale deployment and installation of Easy Projects was easy. “The support team at Easy Projects has been extremely helpful in assisting us with implementation; resolving issues in a timely manner.” reflects Scott.

“Training our team on how to use EP has been easy as well.” The straightforward interface of Easy Projects .NET allows both novice and experienced users to quickly learn, adapt and begin to manage their projects.

Outcome

Easy Projects .NET is now used by 200 licensed users at the Sanford IT department, with nearly 200 projects in progress at any given time.

All department projects are now approved, planned and managed through Easy Projects .NET, which resulted in improved workflow from project conception to completion. With powerful filters, role based security and all teams utilizing one uniform database, access is given to all stakeholders and projects are easy to track and can be reported on in a number of different ways.

By making the project review and approval process consistent through Easy Projects .NET, the Sanford IT department can now allocate more time to actual projects, rather than focusing on manually managing and tracking project throughput.

“Tracking projects through the system by using powerful filtering tools and implementing role based security have been very important to us.”

“Customized features allow the system to grow to our specific needs, making us more efficient in our ability to approve projects, as well as report on the status and throughput of all projects in the system.” says Scott.

“And by defining specific target goals for our overall PM methodology up front, Easy Projects .NET acted as a vehicle for implementing and enforcing those practices. For us, implementing Easy Projects .NET along with other methodology practices has been a culture change; as we are evolving and improving every day.”

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