LifeArc manages portfolios of multi-million pound projects with Power Framework PPM

The non-for-profit brings its seven portfolios ranging from clinical research projects to IT management under one hood.

Background

LifeArc is a self-funding, not-for-profit medical research organisation that takes promising early stage scientific research and turns it into new tests, treatments and devices for patients. It bridges the gap between the lab and the patient, turning life science ideas into life-changing medical breakthroughs. The metaphorical arc connects two worlds – on the one hand, the scientists’ imagination, determination and knowledge, and on the other, organisations that transform ideas into drugs, diagnostics, and devices to be used by patients.    

  • Brand

    LifeArc-logo-1

  • Sector

    Non-for-profit, Life sciences

  • Key challenge

    Full portfolio visibility, enhancing decision making and resource allocation.

thumbnail_image

 

The Challenge

With 109 active projects across seven portfolios and £1,3bn investments under its management, LifeArc knew back in 2019 that a centralised PMO solution was needed. Matt Franklin, Head of PMO operations, explains: 

“Our project data was scattered across multiple locations – including a legacy content management system, a scientific data repository, desktops, OneDrive folders, SharePoint - so the need for a Portfolio and Program Management software was not in question!”

Matt Franklin
Head of PMO operations

It took the best part of a year to create a detailed requirement brief, scan the market and invite five key vendors to take part in a tender. The preferred vendor was invited to undertake a pilot, which started at the end of 2019. Trialing the off-the-shelf solution, the implementation didn’t take into consideration LifeArc’s business processes, so the software failed to achieve the minimum success criteria. Nevertheless, it did prove the value of a customisable centralised solution.

The Solution

That initial experiment led Matt to explore the native options within the Microsoft ecosystem. It made total sense. Their user community was familiar with Microsoft;  the return on investments would be maximised, and the integration would be natural. At this point, Matt was introduced to Power Framework. He was impressed by its capabilities and decided to run a pilot in 2021.

With the learning from the prior unsuccessful solution trial, it was crucially important for Matt that the new solution was “done with us” instead of “done to us”. This included an approach of starting small, with an initial pilot that included just some twenty projects. Once this had gone well, Matt proceeded with configuration and deployment across all portfolios. LifeArc worked closely with Power Framework’s Customer Success Team to ensure the solution adjusted to LifeArc’s project processes and not the other way around.

The roll-out

The system was implemented in two phases. 

Phase 1:

  • pre-built-icon

    Build and test a Minimum Viable Product and use for Pilot

  • hide-rows

    Functionality Scope: Project Management, Resource Management, Financial Management

  • Raise risk

    Team training

Phase 2:

  • enhance-collboration

    Building on the foundations delivered during Phase 1 and rolling out to further portfolios

  • Workflow

    Engaging and deploying to further users

  • connect-icon

    Delivering a variety of configuration enhancements, further reporting, and integration with financial accounting system

The configuration

Power Framework is a rich application for Project Portfolio Management and Matt and his team chose to deploy an extended set of features to support a wide range of processes. This includes integrated resource and financial management with links to their financial accounting system to send cost forecasts and receive back actuals.

Various automations are in place, such as the automated creation of Microsoft Teams environments for new projects, with templated folders and content associated with the project type. Power Framework also generates a Project for the Web schedule based on appropriate templates.

What made it particularly successful

Matt is confident that positive engagement with the Project Leaders is key to  Power Framework being a big hit in the organisation. His winning strategy was to form a Project Leader community through which the PMO could provide training, coaching and mentoring, and the group could give feedback and share best practices. This strategy worked and now everyone is engaged.

Matt explains:

“As we’re using the Microsoft ecosystem, there’s limited training required due to the intuitive and familiar feel of the platform.”

To support the user community further, Matt’s team launched an intranet site providing training videos, process documentation, templates and other helpful resources.

 

Resource mockup-min

 

Results

With Power Framework providing the single source of truth for all Project Portfolio Management data, everyone who needs information can now access it instantly using Power BI dashboards. This has saved countless hours that were invested in the past to compile and distribute report decks manually.

Risk management is another area where Power Framework is invaluable.  Greater risk visibility fosters safer investments in medical technology. One of the fields the charity heavily invests in is children’s cancer research. With Power Framework, those potentially life-changing decisions about drug development will be made with the utmost scrutiny, considering all the available data.

Employees are happy too. They have full transparency of their to-do-lists. The system captures all actions and decisions so no data is ever lost. New employees find it much easier to get up to speed and start contributing.  

“It’s great that our project teams are so engaged with it”, says Matt. This is not surprising given that each department and project leader benefited from it.

Organisational outcomes

For Senior Executives:

  • Real-time access to all portfolio data
  • Full visibility of resource and financial demand as well as risk to support better decision-making

For Project Leaders:

  • Significant time saving in tracking project data and submitting status reports
  • Single repository and uniform structure of project information, making it easy to adopt LifeArc’s process standards
  • Ease of use through familiar Microsoft toolset

For PMO managers and financial controllers:

  • Real-time view of project and portfolio health without the overhead of manual report creation
  • Consistent planning and throughput of projects, assisted by pragmatic resource demand forecasts
  • Focus on continuous improvement with a future-proof platform that can scale and be quickly adapted to changing requirements.

Prior to this, it took an inordinate amount of time and energy to prepare slide decks for our governance forums and as soon as the reports were committed to Power Point, they were potentially out of date. Now we’re able to report most of our data in near real time, with minimal effort. 

Matt Franklin
Head of PMO operations

New possibilities

Matt has plans to introduce further capabilities in the future:

“With a trajectory that suggests a two to threefold increase in the number of projects we will be managing in the next seven years, we have a need for dynamic and real-time assessment of portfolio scenarios. Therefore we are looking to adopt Power Framework’s Portfolio Modelling tool”.

Another area of potential is the integration with Lifearc’s HR system, to retrieve resource information such as booked holidays, helping to refine resource management whilst avoiding double-entry. Finally, with Microsoft’s leadership in Artificial Intelligence, Power Framework is the ideal platform to introduce AI capabilities and explore their real-world benefit to the operation.

“We’ve achieved so much with Power Framework already – and we know there are more exciting possibilities ahead!” concludes Matt. 

Have a complex project portfolio to manage?

 

Book a demo