April 26, 2023
Step Up For Students partnered with Winmill PPM to implement Clarity, a strategic portfolio management solution
This is a blog from a Broadcom Software Knight, as part of an elite group of Partner Technical Professionals who have demonstrated technical expertise in Broadcom Software’s products and are recognized as experts in their field.
As a Broadcom Knight, I have had many opportunities to positively transform businesses and their users. Most recently, I had a unique opportunity to work with Step Up For Students, a small non-profit organization that provides scholarships to students from low-income families, students with unique abilities, students who have experienced bullying, and students who have literacy challenges. It was truly one of my most rewarding projects.
Step Up For Students: Paving a New Path Forward
Over the past few years, Step Up for Students has experienced tremendous growth in the number of applications for its services. With over 250,000 student scholarships served in 2022-2023, Step Up For Students IT (Information Technology) needed a more efficient and sustainable way to manage projects and programs. Their existing tools were no longer sufficient. In addition to improving efficiency, they wanted to enable the organization to map the work they are doing to the organization’s Objectives and measure progress using Key Results. As a result, Step Up For Students partnered with Winmill PPM and Broadcom to implement Clarity, a strategic portfolio management solution.
The Broadcom Knights program helped us throughout the entire process working with Step Up For Students. Early in the process, the program gave us the skills and confidence to present Clarity in a way that resonated with the organization and addressed their issues. For example, when Step Up For Students evaluated several project and portfolio management and value stream management applications, they found that most had some form of project, portfolio, and resource management capabilities but lacked a native way to manage OKRs. They needed a product with the flexibility to add this capability, and it needed to be delivered in a Low Code/No Code manner. When speaking with Winmill PPM about Broadcom’s ValueOps solutions, Clarity checked nearly every box on their wish list, except a native OKR solution.
The Broadcom Knight training on the newest features and future direction of Clarity allowed us to confidentiality guide the customer throughout the implementation process and provide the OKR capabilities that they needed. For example, at a Knights event, we learned about Broadcom’s “Cookbooks.” We utilized Broadcom’s OKR “Recipe” as a starting point to create the Step Up For Students OKR solution and added a reporting layer on top to set the organization up for future success in tracking progress towards their goal.
Now, with a few clicks of a button, Step Up For Students can manage their projects and build meaningful roadmaps to ensure that they are investing their precious time and money into the work that delivers the most value, not just to their organization but also to the students they support.
What's Next
The Clarity implementation had an immediate positive impact on the organization. We started small by just deploying the solution to their IT department. Based on its success, Step Up For Students is looking at how they can roll this out to different parts of their organization. By standardizing how they gather and manage their data, they have saved hours and hours of work each week, which now they can then devote to running their projects. In fact, the morale of their team has improved because they don’t have to do busy work and, instead, can focus on the actual work that they like to do.
The success of this implementation clearly demonstrates that you don’t have to be a large organization to take advantage of the many benefits that Clarity provides. In fact, Winmill PPM has done numerous implementations starting at 50+ users.
Broadcom and Winmill PPM: Delivering Priceless Value to Our Customers
Today every organization, large or small, is on a digital transformation journey. To begin to deliver priceless value, you need to first meet the customer wherever they are in their journey. Broadcom Knight training was invaluable in our work with Step Up For Students. Although I had deep experience working with Clarity (I have worked with the product since 2007), it was sometimes difficult to stay on top of its latest new features, use cases, etc. The Broadcom Knight training enables our team not only to close that information gap, but also provide insights that highlight the “art of the possible.” This training includes information on upcoming new product features before they are available to the public, which allows our customers, such as Step Up For Students, to implement the new features as soon as they are available.
At Winmill PPM, we provide premier service to our customers. While we work with several different technology vendors, there is nothing like the Broadcom Knights program. Broadcom’s dedication to their partners is unmatched! Our company – and our customers such as Step Up For Students – have benefited greatly from our involvement in the program and I look forward to continued engagement. In fact, we currently have three Clarity Broadcom Knights. Our goal is to add Rally to our growing portfolio of Broadcom Knight Certifications.
*Parts of this Blog were posted on www.winmill.com and with their permission, we are posting on Broadcom.com
All trademarks, trade names, service marks and logos referenced herein belong to their respective companies.
Doug Kalkowski
Doug has been working with Clarity since 2007. As a Sr. Solution Architect, he helps organizations with Clarity implementations from start to finish, and in some cases picking up existing implementations and refining their usage to follow best practices so organizations can get the most out of their PPM implementation.
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