Just Plug-In pmPoint to Detangle the Wires

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As law firm Sheppard Mullin grew worldwide, the IT department spent great effort trying to manage many, many projects at once. The pain has ended with BrightWork pmPoint, the first collaborative project management application offering structure and flexibility. BrightWork pmPoint is a project management plug-in for your SharePoint environment that works great! Start your project in pmPoint, and assign tasks to anyone on the project team or manage across multiple projects. Using highly customizable templates, pmPoint offers something new, process-driven project management – setting it apart from other project management programs, pmPoint lets you develop a methodology for the way your projects work.

Before using pmPoint, everything was ad-hoc with no control. With over 500 attorneys in 11 law offices in California, New York, D.C. and Shanghai, Sheppard Mullin juggled 120 new IT projects every year. The logistics were frightful. How do you keep tabs on 60 simultaneous projects with no platform for collaboration, no process or methodology, no common tool? Even if you could think up a structure to follow, how do you enforce it across all the IT departments? Sheppard Mullin got lucky and found the way to work out their project kinks!

Without an existing collaboration platform, Sheppard Mullin’s IT department implemented Microsoft SharePoint. This phenomenal collaboration tool was not enough on its own – the plan needed to include a PM tool that could match that power. A simple web search revealed www.brightwork.com - creating collaboration-focused project management tools is BrightWork’s mainstay, since back in the Lotus Notes heyday. BrightWork jumped aboard the Microsoft ship in ’98 – creating tools for MS Exchange and shifted to SharePoint when it debuted in ’01. When SharePoint 2003 released, BrightWork pmPoint was born. Besides offering great collaboration and process-driven project management, they rounded out pmPoint with task and issue management features, making it the robust product it is today.

BrightWork pmPoint is definitely a slick solution! Perfect for mid-sized companies like Sheppard Mullin, the supplied single and multiple project management templates let you create your own methodology and structure for your projects. The Sheppard Mullin IT department started with a standard template that used a PM methodology based on the Microsoft Solutions Framework. They customized that template to fit their projects, and use it as the starting gate for every new IT project.

Just enter the parameters for a new project and an administrator approves or denies the project upfront. Bogus and nonsense projects never get the green light – legit projects are approved and a SharePoint website is set up. The project manager adds the final project details so tasks can be distributed to the team. “There’s so much information and effort that goes into the template, it enables them to rapidly deploy any project,” says Eamonn McGuinness, CEO of BrightWork.

Status Reporting, an integral feature of pmPoint, is used to share project status within Sheppard Mullin. “We have a weekly meeting, and in 30 minutes we know the status of every project. We can look at a single report across many projects, or for just one project. BrightWork pmPoint provides a penetrating visibility into our projects, allowing us to see and address issues, ultimately leading to a much better success rate,” says Dora Martinez, Director of Project Management for Sheppard Mullin. Outside of Sheppard Mullin, current and exact project status reports can be generated for others – exporting from pmPoint into a common business application like MS Excel is super easy.

BrightWork pmPoint gave Sheppard Mullin a straight forward and cost effective solution to managing multiple projects, eliminating the routine IT fire drills. SharePoint with the pmPoint plug-in enabled teams from different offices around the world to easily communicate and work on projects together. BrightWork pmPoint’s enhanced template system was the key to standardizing project management, giving Sheppard Mullin a repeatable methodology that works. The result – phenomenal IT project success!