Business Process and Tool Improvements for MARTA's R&A Organization
Goal
MARTA's goal is to achieve Authority-wide use of these Office products to improve business processes and project management, as well as greatly reduce redundant storage and distribution of departmental documents and corporate reports.
Challenges
- MARTA client lacked awareness of potential business process improvements which could be achieved via Office SharePoint Server and Office Project Server.
- Most business processes were "manual "and involved storing thousands of Excel, Word and PowerPoint documents on numerous LAN drives and local hard drives. Email was being used to distribute hundreds of daily, weekly, monthly and annual reports within MARTA, resulting in numerous copies and often multiple versions of files being stored in each department.
- Project planning and tracking was primarily "ad hoc" and decentralized, even within departments.
- Internal IT support was almost completely dedicated to supporting existing corporate systems and lacked the resources and the mandate to explore and implement office system improvements.
Solution
Cognitive's approach was to:
- Interview the Research and Analysis Project Sponsor and key organizational performers. This process utilized a Cognitive-developed Business Process Analysis interview technique and templates. These interviews helped identify numerous business processes which could be optimized by using SharePoint Server and Project Server.
- Evaluate current office support systems; specifically the availability of Office Server products. This identified an existing, little-used single-server "demo" version of Office SharePoint Server 2007. Cognitive then used this environment to provision and demonstrate sample team sites for the sponsor's organization. Cognitive also demonstrated Project Web Access 2007, which was running on a Cognitive test server.
- At the client's request, Cognitive wrote technical specifications for a MARTA corporate SharePoint Server and Project Server 2007 environment. Upon approval of funding, the IT organization then procured and installed a three-server hardware environment: Web server, Application Server and Database servers. IT also installed Microsoft Windows Server 2003, SQL Server 2005 Enterprise, Office Project Server 2007, and Office SharePoint Server 2007.
- Cognitive personnel then configured Windows SharePoint Services, established web applications, developed SharePoint team sites, provisioned and configured Project Web Access and installed Project Professional 2007 on numerous desktops. Cognitive also developed and delivered customer-specific training courses, including one course for team-member use of Office SharePoint Server and Project Web Access, and one for Project Manager use of Project Professional 2007 / Project Server 2007 and advanced PWA features.
- Cognitive Technologies provided IT strategy consulting and developed and delivered customer-specific training.
Cognitive Value Added
As a result of this project the Cognitive Technologies team implemented Office SharePoint Server 2007, Office Project Server 2007, Project Web Access and Project Professional 2007 and transferred knowledge to MARTA team personnel. MARTA has increased customer efficiency, utilizing SharePoint-based document storage, collaboration and workflows as well as Project Professional and Project Server 2007-based Project and Activity management.