Vantiv is a payment processing and technology provider headquartered in the greater Cincinnati, Ohio area. The company manages hundreds of IT and product development projects and needed a way to more effectively manage its project portfolio as well as at the individual project level.

Paul Schaefer, the firm’s IT director responsible for project management technology acquisition and management, needed a product that would embellish the firm’s 2,000 seat investment in Microsoft Project Server. He needed a tool that would help the company (a) understand how its project portfolio was being managed and (b) show how each project was performing.

Schaefer asked Microsoft for recommendations of such products and received five recommendations.  He started the vendor assessment after pulling together a core team of stakeholders and end users. When they saw PROJILITY Hammerhead, Schaefer said the product was light years ahead of where the other products were.

Schaefer said he wanted to report project progress at a high level portfolio view and a low level project view. He said Hammerhead was able to show both sides while the other products they looked at were not strong on the Portfolio side. “Hammerhead does a great job showing summaries at the portfolio level which is something we didn’t see in other products,” he said.

The team liked how well Hammerhead Integrated with Microsoft Project Server. Schaefer said that Hammerhead brought so much to the table that it gave his organization the opportunity to improve on their project portfolio management best practices. They implemented Hammerhead nearly two years after they first implemented Project Server.

Specific benefits Schaefer said his team has experienced with Hammerhead:

  • Extreme ease of use. Intuitive and easy to understand.
  • Easy to tweak reports and modify them.
  • Speed of page render was a benefit.

Schaefer also said the PROJILITY product support team was extremely knowledgeable on the Project Server data model which helped Vantiv get up and running.

“It was important to get off of Excel and move to a live, web-based project reporting platform,” he said. “We are managing over 100 enterprise projects and 80% of portfolio is getting run through Hammerhead.”