How Portfolio Manager upgraded Hayward Tyler’s project management…and then did it again

About Hayward Tyler

Hayward Tyler is an engineering and manufacturing company in the fast paced energy sector, working to grow the engineering services side of their business. Their daily work involves projects that require incredible amounts of detail, shifting resources, and a lot of technical challenges – so they need tools to match those demands.

They were working in Microsoft Project but found they had started to outgrow its functionality and struggled to see the interdependencies between projects. That is when they came across Portfolio Manager (formerly Portfolio Manager) and discovered the difference it could make for Hayward Tyler and all their teams.

Right away, they found the prioritization of tasks and the ability to assign resources and track time all in one place was a giant step forward.

Below is the story of how Portfolio Manager took Hayward Tyler’s project management to the next level, the migration process from classic to new Portfolio Manager, and how both classic and new helped their employees work more effectively.

Project prioritization made simple

Managing around 20-25 active projects with only 20 team members, almost everyone at Hayward Tyler works on multiple projects at one time with priorities shifting regularly. That means ensuring the right tasks are being worked on at the right time by the right people can get very challenging.

Additionally, with the number of active projects teams manage and new projects being considered every day, Hayward Tyler needed to have a way to show a time-phased demand for all resources. That information could then be used to determine when new work could be started, and when resources have too much – or too little – work scheduled.

This is exactly the functionality that Portfolio Manager brought to their teams. It could create project management timelines and real-time scenario modelling so project manager’s could get more accurate timelines, see the bandwith for their teams, and get the right people working on the right projects.

Portfolio Manager, with its assignments, grid views, and time export, provided Hayward Tyler’s teams with a phased forecast of scheduled work to help them to better understand both past and future utilization of people.

Finally, Hayward Tyler had a tool that could match up to the way their business operates and could manage multiple different projects on parallel paths.

Migration from Portfolio Manager Classic

Hayward Tyler initially made the move to Portfolio Manager back in 2016 and enjoyed the ability to manage their projects and predict how their working capacity would change as their projects developed.

However, as time and technology progressed, Portfolio Manager continued to develop and launched a new version with updated features in 2021. The team at Hayward Tyler wanted to make the move to the new version – so began the process to migrate to Portfolio Manager New.

Hayward Tyler were interested in the idea of multiple workspaces so that the work could be split up based on a number of characteristics of projects, one of which being the primary team working on them, thus allowing users to focus on just the projects in their purview.

Portfolio Manager New has added assignments so the work on a single task can be broken down in more detail, which Hayward Tyler PM’s love. They tend to have a number of handoffs within a task, and assignments allow them to better plan, track and schedule them.

The ability to download data for sorting and processing provided by Grid View is another feature that managers love to use often.

The results

• Scheduling limits are more robust than daily limits, allowing Portfolio Manager New to address multiple parallel projects in a way that classic could not.

• Assignments allow a better breakdown of tasks to see progress and manage handoffs as checklist items are completed.

• Board view is more in line with agile methodologies.

Smooth migration experience

“The migration was fantastic! The transition of data was almost seamless. We logged out of Classic on a Friday and into new Portfolio Manager on Monday.”

Shauna Richardson, PMP, Hayward Tyler

A Portfolio Manager migration expert helped guide the team through the transition. Migration readiness consultation leading up to the actual data migration allowed them to clean up some of the legacy data and add some additional tags to assist in the migration and ensure that everything ended up where it belonged. Questions were answered and issues resolved very quickly both before and after the migration, and feedback is continually monitored.

The migration was a success, with everything transitioning overnight with minimal issues and now the team at Hayward Tyler have all the same features they enjoyed from classic Portfolio Manager with improved data customization options, new collections and sub-tasks, and plenty of other updates to make their project management and scheduling smoother.