This tri-jurisdictional public transit agency operates transit service and was created by the United States Congress as an interstate compact between three states on the East Coast. Between rail, bus, and paratransit services in a 1,500-square mile area, the system averages a ridership of 239,741,800, or about 871,000 per weekday. As the second busiest Metrorail system in the U.S., and with its own police force, our client is always striving to be the most innovative public transit agency to tackle ongoing industry challenges.
Prior to implementing monday.com, the Communications and Signaling team, which consists of half a dozen departments, was utilizing Microsoft Projects as their project management tool. Although having some technology in place was a good first step, there was no structure in place to keep projects organized.
The SVP who oversaw the team had very little visibility into projects, as information was stored in multiple locations. A key part of the SVP’s role is to review, approve, and sign off on documents. At any given time, she has over 60 projects and hundreds of documents to review on a regular basis, so it was critical for the team to streamline their processes, store everything in a central hub, and provide more visibility to the SVP so she could understand the exact status of projects and clearly see what she needed to review and approve.
The OrangeDot team implemented a two-pronged solution to streamline project management: first, they created a high-level Portfolio board that centrally housed all of the team’s projects. This board allows the team to organize their projects by department, so the SVP can clearly see all project activity across the Communications and Signaling team, and can also drill down into specific departments. Within the Portfolio board, individual projects are tracked in their own boards. PMs and team members can track granular detail while rolling up only the important information that Leadership is interested in.
Second, they created a separate task board specifically for the SVP to access daily. This board essentially creates a master list of tasks for the SVP to review. The team’s project boards are synced with this task board, which allows seamless two-way communication without inundating the SVP with scattered information. This means data is not being updated in two separate places and any time the team makes updates to their projects, it’s updated on the SVP’s board, and vice versa.
The SVP’s board has a separate section for completed projects, which helps her to focus on projects that are still in progress, particularly those that are behind schedule, so she can understand where the bottlenecks are and can jump in to keep those projects moving. Team members can also send the SVP notes through their Portfolio board - the SVP’s Executive Assistant is also cc’d on these notes so she can help block and tackle any actions required by the SVP.
Fast forward to today, the team has fully embraced this new solution and the SVP appreciates the streamlined processes that are in place. The team feels more connected and has seen increased day-to-day collaboration and communication. The new process has provided each team with the ability to customize their work while still standardizing aspects of projects that Leadership had requested.
With one source of truth for their entire portfolio, each team has visibility into the work that the other teams are doing. Leadership can see the progress and health of each project, and drill down into specifics if needed. From a task standpoint, the SVP is able to review and approve documents at a much faster speed and has a clear paper trail across all 60+ projects. The SVP has a central location that she can use to communicate with requestors, upload documents, and track their own tasks.
The new boards and workflows have not only saved the team hours of time each week, they have increased visibility across departments and up to the SVP. Lastly, the team has increased confidence that project data is accurate, current, and reliable.
