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The Challenge

This private, not-for-profit pediatric health system is one of the largest and most respected of its kind in the country, helping more than 278,700 patients a year across more than 40 locations. Its mission, making life better for children, from daily wellness visits to specialty and critical care, depends on clinical staff having fast, reliable access to information. Behind the scenes, though, the organization’s project and portfolio management ran on an aging Microsoft Project Server environment approaching the end of its supported life, alongside a SharePoint platform that clinical care staff relied on daily for collaborating on patient care documentation.

The stakes of the upgrade were unusually high. The hospital’s systems were built on a high-availability architecture with redundancy across web, application, and database tiers specifically to avoid disruption to patient care, which meant the migration had to be executed with virtually zero tolerance for downtime. Years of use had also left the system cluttered with outdated projects, fields, and resources, and a growing reporting backlog made it difficult for hospital directors to get real-time visibility into portfolio health. The organization needed an accurate, forward-looking view of resource capacity across more than 3,000 projects, not just a historical record of what had already happened.

The Solution

PPM Works implemented an “Always On” upgrade strategy purpose-built for a critical hospital environment, successfully migrating thousands of projects and sites and rolling out to more than 500 new resources with a seamless, disruption-free transition for end users. Rather than introduce a wave of new functionality all at once, the team took an “as-is” upgrade approach: preserving familiar workflows for clinical and project staff while modernizing the platform underneath them, then layering in new capability once the foundation was stable.

With the core upgrade complete, PPM Works extended SharePoint sites to give hospital directors real-time access to key documents and status reporting, closing a visibility gap that had previously required manual follow-up. On the reporting side, the team built advanced weekly resource allocation analysis by role and by project, giving leadership the ability to see where capacity was tight before it became a problem. Integration between Project and the hospital’s clinical EPIC system extended SharePoint document access across every hospital in the network, and a new single source of truth for enterprise, tactical, and operational projects meant every stakeholder, from project managers to executives, was finally working from the same up-to-date data.

The Results

By pairing a technically disciplined “as-is” upgrade with envisioning sessions to map out future-phase functionality, PPM Works delivered the project on time and on budget, without asking clinical and project staff to relearn their day-to-day tools in the middle of a hospital’s busiest operations. The health system now runs a modern, always-on PPM environment that gives executives, directors, and project teams a shared, trustworthy view of the work that matters most: the thousands of projects supporting better care for the children and families it serves.