Profile - Avalara
Client Profile
Name: Avalara
Contact: Susan Borgstrom, Project Management Office (PMO)
Location: Seattle
Industry: Software -- Sales & Use Tax Management
Business Description: Our integrated, cloud–based products and services make it simple to calculate rates, manage exemption certificates, and file and remit state sales taxes. Best of all, AvaTax provides seamless compatibility with dozens of ERP, accounting, e–commerce and POS systems.
Demographics: Avalara is a rapidly growing company with ~ 200 employees throughout the USA and India. The main office is on Bainbridge Island, WA (near Seattle), and we also have offices in Seattle WA, Falls Church VA, Atlanta GA, San Diego CA, Irvine CA, and Pune, India. Additionally, many employees work from remote home offices.
Contact: Susan Borgstrom, Project Management Office (PMO)
Location: Seattle
Industry: Software -- Sales & Use Tax Management
Business Description: Our integrated, cloud–based products and services make it simple to calculate rates, manage exemption certificates, and file and remit state sales taxes. Best of all, AvaTax provides seamless compatibility with dozens of ERP, accounting, e–commerce and POS systems.
Demographics: Avalara is a rapidly growing company with ~ 200 employees throughout the USA and India. The main office is on Bainbridge Island, WA (near Seattle), and we also have offices in Seattle WA, Falls Church VA, Atlanta GA, San Diego CA, Irvine CA, and Pune, India. Additionally, many employees work from remote home offices.
Client's Pain Point
The Project Management Office (PMO) must deliver a unified project portfolio report to provide executive visibility into upcoming system changes and associated resource allocation. Our company has grown through acquisition and as a result we must report across 4 distinct development teams using 3 different Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) systems.
We’re just ramping up but already we have 33 active projects and 47 active development resources, with updates provided by 10 different project leads. Many of our resources are split across multiple projects, and it was difficult to know if a resource was fully-burdened or had additional bandwidth to take on more project work. We also had no visibility into the resource impact when a project slips, since our project planning was product-specific and couldn’t aggregate information from other plans.
We need a light-weight solution for overloaded project leads to easily communicate project milestones, resource allocation, and weekly project status.
We need a single source of resource allocation information so that we can more efficiently utilize our resources, reposition products and teams based on resource cost, and increase team satisfaction.
The Project Management Office (PMO) must deliver a unified project portfolio report to provide executive visibility into upcoming system changes and associated resource allocation. Our company has grown through acquisition and as a result we must report across 4 distinct development teams using 3 different Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) systems.
We’re just ramping up but already we have 33 active projects and 47 active development resources, with updates provided by 10 different project leads. Many of our resources are split across multiple projects, and it was difficult to know if a resource was fully-burdened or had additional bandwidth to take on more project work. We also had no visibility into the resource impact when a project slips, since our project planning was product-specific and couldn’t aggregate information from other plans.
We need a light-weight solution for overloaded project leads to easily communicate project milestones, resource allocation, and weekly project status.
We need a single source of resource allocation information so that we can more efficiently utilize our resources, reposition products and teams based on resource cost, and increase team satisfaction.Solution
Project Leads:
Each week, all of our project leads log into the application and update the project health and a brief status note. Each product group hosts a project review meeting with key stakeholders to review the project status – and we structure the meeting around the Roadmap application.
PMO:
The PMO reviews the portfolio and exports an Excel “Snapshot report” for distribution to the Executive team. The PMO also reviews resource allocation across project teams to ensure the efficient use of key resources and support resource planning for future initiatives.
Executives:
In addition to receiving the Excel “Snapshot report” with the week’s portfolio status, the executives are also able to login to review project details, if desired, which limits interrupts for the delivery teams.
Before we had Roadmap, project status reporting was inconsistent across our different development teams, and resource allocation was impossible to track. Individual project leads would manage work for their teams with Excel or MS Project or QuickBase or Trac or SharePoint lists or whiteboards. We didn’t need to force everyone into a unified ALM tool in order to collect executive-level project portfolio reports. Roadmap provides just enough horsepower to collect the necessary level of information without all the overhead and implementation expense of a full ALM solution.
We managed to roll out the Roadmap solution across our Product Development teams within 6 weeks from pilot to full adoption. We expect to onboard all of our IT and Infrastructure projects in the next month.
Project Leads:
Each week, all of our project leads log into the application and update the project health and a brief status note. Each product group hosts a project review meeting with key stakeholders to review the project status – and we structure the meeting around the Roadmap application.
PMO:
The PMO reviews the portfolio and exports an Excel “Snapshot report” for distribution to the Executive team. The PMO also reviews resource allocation across project teams to ensure the efficient use of key resources and support resource planning for future initiatives.
Executives:
In addition to receiving the Excel “Snapshot report” with the week’s portfolio status, the executives are also able to login to review project details, if desired, which limits interrupts for the delivery teams.
Before we had Roadmap, project status reporting was inconsistent across our different development teams, and resource allocation was impossible to track. Individual project leads would manage work for their teams with Excel or MS Project or QuickBase or Trac or SharePoint lists or whiteboards. We didn’t need to force everyone into a unified ALM tool in order to collect executive-level project portfolio reports. Roadmap provides just enough horsepower to collect the necessary level of information without all the overhead and implementation expense of a full ALM solution.
We managed to roll out the Roadmap solution across our Product Development teams within 6 weeks from pilot to full adoption. We expect to onboard all of our IT and Infrastructure projects in the next month.Benefits
- Executive visibility into a consolidated portfolio report
- Transparent resource allocation, resulting in more effective resource utilization
- Uniform status reporting process across diverse teams worldwide
- Consistent vocabulary to describe products, projects and releases
- Aggregated historical project and resource allocation information, for future planning
- Executive visibility into a consolidated portfolio report
- Transparent resource allocation, resulting in more effective resource utilization
- Uniform status reporting process across diverse teams worldwide
- Consistent vocabulary to describe products, projects and releases
- Aggregated historical project and resource allocation information, for future planning
