ADVISICON Project Management Office Development and Microsoft® Office Project Server / EPM CASE STUDY

Abstract
Volaris is the fastest growing airline based in Mexico. With little time to adjust to the growth, the organization infrastructure was unable to support critical functions that allowed smooth data capture and collaboration. Through the solution developed by Advisicon, a PMO was implemented and Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 was deployed. Volaris was able to develop better visibility into the overall IT project portfolio as well as adopt standard project management methodology. Through these solutions, they were also able to improve their overall project management processes and gain control of their operations.

Volaris
Volaris is the commercial brand of the Mexican corporation Concesionaria Vuela Compañía de Aviación S.A. de C.V., a low-cost airline based in the city of Toluca, Mexico State. It is also the fastest growing airline in Mexico. Volaris is headquartered in Santa Fe (Mexico City) and its operational base is located in Toluca, 50 kilometers (31 miles) west of Mexico City.

The unprecedented growth of Volaris was exciting, but was creating internal havoc. The organization infrastructure was essentially unprepared to handle the volume of incremental work caused by the growth. The company also needed to have better project portfolio visibility into their IT projects to provide for better administration and control. To further complicate matters, they did not have a tool to facilitate collaboration in the monitoring and control of their projects.

As a result, Volaris was experiencing:

• No standardization in processes
• No adopted methodology for project management
• No centralized reporting functions or operations

A thorough evaluation by Advisicon included the important aspects of discovery workshops, training and validation sessions for formats and processes. Through these investigation, a comprehensive solution that included the implementation of a PMO (level #2) integrated with Microsoft Office Project Server 2007 was developed. The Microsoft technology was able to provide the functionality that was critical to Volaris, while allowing additional options for growth and scalability. Additionally, the ease-of-use to resources was an important factor in implementing the system.

Upon installation of the new system, Volaris saw benefits nearly immediately. Most notably:

• Control of project administration through standardized processes to improve requirements gathering, ultimately leading to  better project administration and execution
• Efficiency in collaboration and communication across the organization 
• Increased resource management and workload visibility

• Microsoft® Project Server 2007
• Microsoft® Project Professional 2007
• Microsoft® Windows SharePoint Services
• Advisicon training curriculum for internal resources — including production managers, resource managers, executives and administrators

USERS

• Resource managers
• Administrators
• Project resources
• Executives