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The Challenge

Like many organizations that grow through acquisition and expansion, this manufacturer had built up twelve distinct business units, each with its own way of managing projects, budgets, and risk. Some units tracked cost and revenue in spreadsheets; others kept informal RAID logs buried in email threads; a few had no consistent reporting cadence at all. Leadership needed a single, secure environment where every unit could monitor project cost and revenue, resource utilization, risks, actions, issues and decisions, progress against key driver goals, and business unit security, without losing the flexibility each group needed to reflect its own way of working.

Complicating matters further, R&D and corporate teams needed to collaborate inside Microsoft Teams while keeping certain data siloed by business unit, and any new platform had to satisfy corporate governance requirements without becoming another rigid, top-down mandate that field teams would quietly route around.

The Solution

PPM Works approached the engagement the way it approaches every multi-unit rollout: understand the people first, then build the platform around them. The team executed the OnePlan implementation in phases, starting with foundational elements: portfolio hierarchy, security, and project-level data, before expanding into resource and financial planning, portfolio modeling, and reporting.

Rather than mandate a single configuration from day one, PPM Works held a structured cadence of envisioning sessions and weekly working meetings with each of the twelve business units individually. These sessions surfaced the everyday friction each team was living with: duplicate data entry, reports that didn’t match reality, dashboards nobody trusted, and shaped a configuration that let every unit keep the fields and workflows specific to how it operated, while still rolling up into one standardized, enterprise-wide view for corporate reporting.

Change management was as much a part of the solution as the technology. Many long-tenured team members were understandably resistant to giving up tools they had built themselves over the years; PPM Works worked through that resistance by involving business unit leads directly in configuration decisions rather than presenting them with a finished system, and by pairing the rollout with role-based training, validation exercises, and a structured acceptance process before each unit went live in production.

The Results

Today, all twelve business units operate on the same standardized platform while retaining the flexibility to manage their own data entry needs. Corporate leadership finally has a consistent, trustworthy view of portfolio health, resourcing, and financial performance across the entire R&D organization, without the manual reconciliation that used to eat up hours every reporting cycle. Modern Power BI dashboards and Microsoft Teams integration mean insights and collaboration now happen in the same place work actually gets done.