Government Agency: City of Miami Beach

Solution or Platform Selected: WorkLenz

1. The Government agency's challenge that led to the Cloud or SaaS adoption.
   The City of Miami Beach IT Department has responsibility for the IT standards and policies, infrastructure, enterprise applications, development, implementation, consultation to departments, applications systems integration, and end-user support. They currently provide service to 1500 computers, support 14 Servers and 150 network printers, and support network connectivity to 35 remote locations and a disaster recovery site. Despite the extensive list of responsibilities and assets that required their attention, the IT Department was under fire to justify their resources. Challenged with disproportionate demand for their services, the IT group at the City of Miami Beach struggled with understanding how their resources were allocated. The organization required a process to track the work being done by its employees to show the budget office that retaining development staff was imperative. Additionally, it sought a new reporting capability to display, analyze, and predict organizational capacity in order to justify funding on current and future projects. The City of Miami Beach was using legacy project management systems which prevented them from seeing where their resource hours were focused. The City of Miami Beach needed a cost effective SaaS solution that they could implement quickly to help solve their resource visibility challenges and prevent staff cuts.



2. The solution that was chosen and why that particular solution was selected.
   In July 2008, the City of Miami Beach chose WorkLenz, Métier’s on demand project portfolio management (PPM) software, to solve its capacity planning and reporting issues. WorkLenz is delivered via the software as a service (SaaS) model. It was chosen by the City of Miami Beach because it met their requirements for robust resource management and reporting, is cost effective and has a rapid implementation timeline. The City of Miami Beach also preferred a SaaS product because it wouldn’t require additional support resources within the IT group for installation or ongoing maintenance. Since resources were already at capacity, the IT department couldn’t afford to spend time on implementing, maintaining or upgrading additional software. WorkLenz had the potential to add value immediately by applying best practices for defining, tracking, and reporting on work across the IT group. The combination of these processes and the use of the WorkLenz timesheet allowed the organization to have clear oversight on all work being performed, and additionally ensured that the management team could make informed funding decisions in an environment of fixed capacity and inordinate demand.



3. Results of the implementation. How did the vendor meet the agency's needs?
   Using Métier’s Quick Start Implementation via SaaS, the City of Miami Beach implemented WorkLenz in under two weeks. Replacing Microsoft Project, WorkLenz allows IT executives to quickly understand resource allocation, track allocation by phase (strategy, planning, development) and justify resource cost to the budget office to prevent staff cuts. WorkLenz gives the IT organization full visibility into workstreams and overall project status, providing a clear snapshot of past and current performance and projections on future work. WorkLenz provides managers with reports on current and future resource allocation, facilitating better decision-making. Using WorkLenz, the City standardized data and now has visibility into how much time they’re spending in the following areas, making the case for resource allocation: • Strategy • IT Operations • Design • Implementation • Continuous Improvement The City of Miami Beach was facing staff cuts as their budget was under review. Using WorkLenz, the IT Department was able to justify each employee through allocation and performance reports. The IT organization now reports to executives with a business case for how many resources they need to perform projects based on actual resource allocations reported by WorkLenz. This prevents layoffs and allocates resources in alignment with the City’s strategic initiatives.