Food & Beverage
From Spreadsheet Chaos to Portfolio Clarity
Primary Area
Organizational Project Management (OPM)
Service Area
Project Management (from Excel)
Products Used
Project Online, SharePoint
Roles Impacted
Portfolio Managers, Program Managers, Project Managers, Business Analysts
Impact Highlight
70% reduced project administrative effort
Opportunity
A Fortune 50 Energy Company relied on hundreds of disconnected Excel files for demand capture, schedule updates, risk registers, and cost tracking—resulting in version confusion, missed dependencies, and reactive governance. Leadership recognized the chance to replace spreadsheet heroics with an integrated, data‑driven project and portfolio management model that could scale to global capital programs.
Demand requests submitted in inconsistent Excel templates; prioritization cycles stretched weeks while data was reconciled.
Schedules maintained locally with no automated dependency roll‑ups across engineering, front-line, and maintenance portfolios.
Risk logs lived on personal drives; no common taxonomy, probability/impact scoring, or aggregation to portfolio exposure.
Cost actuals and forecasts copied manually from SAP exports into Excel, driving reconciliation errors and delayed variance reporting.
Limited enterprise reporting; executives saw out‑of‑date snapshots and could not compare sanctioned vs. emerging work.
Duplicate data entry across PMs, and controllers increased administrative burden and audit risk.
Solution
We partnered with the client to align governance across business units, redesign project lifecycle processes, and implement an integrated Microsoft Project & Portfolio Management (PPM) platform that advanced the organization's long‑term capital vision while meeting near‑term compliance requirements. The team delivered a staged rollout anchored in Microsoft Project Online and the Power Platform, with data services to integrate legacy tools (on‑prem Project Server 2013, and point Excel trackers) and enterprise systems (SAP) into a governed portfolio data model.
People: Executive steering forum; PMO competency model; role‑based training for PMs, schedulers, cost engineers, and approvers delivered.
Process: Standardized demand intake forms (Power Apps) feeding gated workflows (Power Automate) mapped to enterprise stage‑gate; common WBS, risk taxonomy, and cost codes aligned to SAP; automated approval routing and audit trails.
Technology: Project Online for centralized schedules & resource management; SharePoint Online for document control; Power BI portfolio dashboards with drill‑through to project detail; Dataverse staging layer synchronizing schedule, risk, and cost data; Dataflows for migration.
Retired / migrated: legacy Project Server 2013 instances, and unmanaged Excel trackers consolidated into governed data services.
Embedded collaboration: Teams channels auto‑provisioned per project with tabs for schedule, risks, financials, and status reports.
Security & compliance: Azure AD groups mapped to project roles; row‑level security in Power BI.
Impact
Within the first operating year, the enterprise PMO solution replaced ad‑hoc Excel tracking with governed, real‑time data accessible across capital, operations, and IT portfolios. Decision latency dropped as leadership could see cross‑portfolio demand, approved funding, schedule health, risk exposure, and cost performance in a single source of truth.
~70% reduction in project administrative effort (status consolidation, manual data entry, reconciliation) following Project Online adoption.
Portfolio review cycle time cut from monthly spreadsheet rollups to weekly data refresh; urgent reprioritizations executed quickly.
On‑time milestone performance improved across large capital projects.
Average cost variance at key stage‑gates reduced due to earlier visibility of commitments vs. forecast.
Enterprise risk exposure reporting moved from quarterly manual compilations to daily aggregated dashboards.
Single source portfolio data enabled scenario modeling in minutes rather than days, improving capital allocation discipline.