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By Chris Whitside

He's not a wild-eyed evangelist but you can't mistake the enthusiasm in Geoff Fox's voice when he talks about project management. Fox, who recently joined FundSERV as senior project manager, has over twenty years of project management experience and has worked with IT teams at such companies as Canadian Tire and AT&T. Yet he still gets excited when talking about things like project management software, which will be central to the success of FundSERV's new project and portfolio management strategy. Working closely with two project co-coordinators and numerous project teams, his mandate is to bring a more formal discipline to project management at FundSERV. Fox hit the ground running with a project portfolio that already includes the ESG V16 implementation, the Business Continuity Plan and the Customer and Document Management initiatives.

"FundSERV has earned an excellent reputation with customers because it has always managed to finish mission-critical projects on time," says Geoff. "As the number and scope of FundSERV projects grew, however, it became more and more difficult to deal with unexpected problems or changes. The only way employees could manage to keep things on track was to work massive amounts of overtime. This leads to employee burnout. And without an efficient way to foresee potential roadblocks, FundSERV executives have been limited in the help they could provide."

FundSERV's new project and portfolio management initiative is built around Solution Q's Eclipse Project Portfolio Management software. Eclipse is a management tool that provides managers with a high level view of the company's entire portfolio of projects.

"Most people will really appreciate Eclipse especially for the amount of time it will save in meetings," adds Geoff. "All project information is right there in Eclipse, available for review at any time. Each project will have a number of milestones and when each milestone is met, it's ticked off in Eclipse. If a milestone is not met, problems can be seen immediately and then resolved between those involved — outside of a large meeting."

Employees at FundSERV can expect to see a lot more of Fox as he begins the Eclipse training process and works to integrate their operations with the new project management methodology.

"FundSERV is growing quickly in terms of functionality and I'm finding the people to be very enthusiastic," adds Geoff. "So it's an exciting challenge for me to help FundSERV grow even faster and stronger with tools that promise to make project management much more, well, manageable. I plan to be very visible in the coming months demonstrating the value and teaching the skills of disciplined project management. And learning from everyone at FundSERV how to make it fit better with what they're trying to do."

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