Parkview Health: Prioritizing Project Investments with Strategic Work Intake

Beyond external industry challenges, Parkview Health faced internal challenges from a lack of portfolio management. There were no processes in place for work intake, project prioritization, or resource allocation, much less a system to provide visibility into the portfolio. Duplication of effort was rampant with multiple teams working on the same projects but creating different results. Good ideas were often lost, while projects that brought little value surged forward.

Parkview Health knew it needed to take a different approach in order to gain control over and optimize its portfolio. The Enterprise Project Portfolio team began a journey to identify the best strategic projects and align them with their strategic 5-year plan. The team implemented the Portfolio Management solution leveraging Planview PPM Pro™ and Work Management solution leveraging Planview ProjectPlace™ as a centralized solution to establish a strategic work intake process, build business cases, provide visibility, and foster collaboration.

Parkview Health is a nonprofit, community-based healthcare system based in Ft. Wayne, Indiana with 14,000 employees who service a population area of one million people. With more than 700 physicians and at least 2.5 million patient encounters per year in its 10 hospitals, Parkview Health is a fixture in the communities it serves.

The demand for healthcare services in the Indiana area was outstripping Parkview Health’s ability to supply those services, fueling competition and forcing the organization to shift from growing by volume to growing by efficiencies. With no enterprise project portfolio management capability or tools in place, every project request was approved without any justifiable business case, alignment to strategy, or concern for funding or resource capacity. There was little visibility into who was doing what, which projects should be prioritized, or if projects in flight were bringing any return on investment.

Parkview Health’s first step towards effective project portfolio management began with establishing core values, all of which were new to the organization. Most importantly, strategic projects are considered investments and must align with the strategic plan. Further, the selection process has to be a team process and transparent to the organization.

Planview PPM Pro was selected for several reasons, notably because it offers a work intake module that establishes a process to pass a request through the system. Stage gates define the workflow to enable the organization to capture the approval and review process as well as scoring criteria give it a way to evaluate projects in a standardized format. Attachments and impact diagrams further provide necessary data to provide visibility and inform decisions.

“Planview PPM Pro makes our lives so much easier, giving us structure and consistency in how we approach projects,” says Michael Havison, director of Enterprise Project Portfolio at Parkview Health. “The real-time dashboards show executives as much project data as they want to see, including status, interdependencies, and important financial details that help them determine what is going to be our next great project.”

With Planview PPM Pro and Planview ProjectPlace, Parkview Health has the structure and visibility that drives efficiencies, helping it remain competitive in the marketplace, even as the industry changes. Business goals are tracked, and strategic proposals are created in PPM Pro, automatically updating its ITSM platform and capital finance system. PPM Pro’s flexible intake module was easily configured to enforce proper project evaluation through a streamlined gated process. The new strategic workflow quickly generated benefits and within a few quick months, Parkview’s senior leadership was able to prioritize and optimize capital spend. Today, contribution margin is baked into everything the organization does and projects are prioritized based on confirmed ROI.

The road to mature portfolio management is a journey. Havison believes they have come a long way in identifying what is mandatory right now and determining what is required in the near and future term. As Parkview Health continues to build an investment-minded culture, they will investigate using Planview LeanKit™ to speed work and Planview IdeaPlace™ to inspire innovation. They also plan to utilize the resource management tools in PPM Pro and use Planview’s API to integrate it with its capital planning application.