Insurance
Unifying Enterprise Project Delivery
Primary Area
OPM
Service Area
Project Management
Products Used
Project Online, SharePoint, Power Platform
Roles Impacted
Portfolio Managers, Program Managers, Project Managers
Impact Highlight
20% increase in resource utilization through capacity reporting
Opportunity
A Fortune 100 insurance provider ran dozens of strategic and regulatory initiatives across semi-autonomous business units that shared scarce delivery talent but planned, budgeted, and tracked work in disconnected tools, obscuring true demand, spend, and capacity. This fragmentation created a clear opportunity to design a coordinated enterprise PMO model that could align vision, standardize data, and improve how resources were committed to the highest-value work.
Pain Points
Disconnected BU-level project plans spread across local MS Project files, and spreadsheets with inconsistent taxonomies.
Shared architect, business analyst, and development pools double-booked; no enterprise resource calendar or skills inventory.
Conflicting prioritization across regulatory, market, and modernization workstreams; deadlines and compliance commitments at risk.
Manual spreadsheet rollups every reporting cycle.
Duplicate tool licensing and fragmented historical data; no trusted single source for status, spend, or capacity.
No common intake, stage definitions, or gated approvals; KPIs varied by business unit.
Solution
We partnered with executive leadership to translate strategic goals into concrete PMO requirements across people, process, and technology. Our team designed, implemented an integrated Microsoft-centric portfolio and resource management solution anchored in Project Online, Power Platform, and Microsoft Teams, while migrating and federating data from legacy files and repositories to create governed, enterprise-grade insight.
What We Did
People & Change Enablement: Enterprise PMO charter; executive steering cadence; role taxonomy and RACI; portfolio manager and resource manager training; community of practice.
Process & Governance: Standard demand intake form (Dataverse) with automated routing; stage-gate lifecycle with defined exit criteria; resource capacity & commitment workflows; integrated financial tracking to cost centers; risk/compliance escalation paths; quarterly portfolio rebalancing.
Technology Implementation: Microsoft Project Online & Project for the web with standardized templates; centralized enterprise resource pool in Project Online synced to Azure AD groups; Power BI portfolio dashboards (capacity, spend, risk heatmaps, regulatory milestones); Power Automate flows for status collection & reminders; Dataverse-backed demand register; Teams-based executive reports.
Impact
The insurer established an enterprise PMO operating on a single, trusted data model with real-time portfolio and resource insight accessible to executives and business unit leads. Consolidation eliminated duplicate reporting effort, improved forecast accuracy, and enabled proactive allocation decisions that increased usable capacity and reduced schedule risk across regulatory and growth programs.
Results
Unified active initiatives from over a dozen project trackers into the governed Project Online portfolio.
Enterprise resource visibility drove proactive allocation; usable capacity up 20%; reduced conflicting assignments.
Idea-to-go/no-go decision cycle reduced through standardized intake and gating.
Gate review schedule variance reduced via common workplan templates and milestone definitions.
Executive reporting cycle cut through automated data pipelines and Power BI.
Decommissioned three redundant PPM toolsets yielding significant cost avoidance.
Regulatory deliverables on-time performance improved.