Swerve Driving School manages projects without project managers

About Swerve Driving School

Swerve Driving School teaches adults and teenagers to drive using a unique curriculum and research-based teaching method. They specialize in teaching driving in a way that focuses on the critical skills drivers need to stay safe on the road.

Of Swerve’s 100 employees, about 60 of these are driving instructors while the rest work in the office. Unlike a typical driving school, they believe technology can improve their driving education curriculum as well as their operational processes, enabling them to bring higher quality service at a more competitive price point to students.

However, Swerve realized early on that what they need is a central place to manage their portfolio of projects – one that could grow with the team and enable collaboration without the need for dedicated project managers.

They found the Portfolio Manager the ideal choice for when the rubber meets the road.

The need for flexible, forward-thinking software

Historically Swerve would use Microsoft Project for project management. However, they realized that they needed something more flexible and forward-thinking.

They evaluated multiple online project management tools, particularly those that would allow them to communicate and collaborate in real-time. Services like Basecamp were useful but were limited in scope and they wanted to avoid using a variety of disconnected, standalone solutions.

Then they found Portfolio Manager, a solution that was well within their budget, would meet all of their requirements, and could grow with their business.

Joe Pruskowski, chairman of Swerve Driving School, added: “After we had been using Portfolio Manager for a year, it became more fundamental to our business with every passing week. These past few years we’ve really ratcheted up our development efforts and we recognized that we needed to do a better job on the project management side of the equation.”

Project management without project managers

Pruskoswski said: “The most salient benefit is our ability to easily collaborate with each other and our external partners. Since we’re always running several projects concurrently, this capability provides a huge improvement in both our overall business process as well as greater visibility into our entire portfolio of projects.”

Although Portfolio Manager is a project management tool, it gives individual team members project management powers, thereby flattening hierarchies and encouraging self-organizing teams. It allows organizations to shift focus from project management to project collaboration.

Swerve have 10 serious day-to-day users and another eight to 10 portal users, such as contractors, working with Portfolio Manager on a regular basis. There are no certified project managers on staff because Portfolio Manager has shown that Swerve don’t actually need them.

Instead, each Portfolio Manager user partakes in the project management process by entering their tasks into a given project, assigning an owner, prioritizing them, and getting back to work.

While Swerve were initially interested in Portfolio Manager from a purely project management perspective, they have since discovered that its collaboration functionality has become much more important. Swerve’s teams now use Portfolio Manager more than email to share documents.

Meanwhile, the commenting feature allows teams to discuss tasks in real time without everyone having to be in the same room.

Portfolio Manager has become Swerve’s central platform for project communications. It has given them the ability to understand what everyone is working on without having to ask for constant status updates. One added benefit is that since Swerve have been using Portfolio Manager for a while, it's given them a way to look back on past projects and understand where their processes are working and where the roadblocks are.

That has led to smoother processes, better collaboration, and a better working life for Swerve and their employees.