After more than four years of evaluating project portfolio management (PPM) platforms, a major food and beverage company was struggling to move forward with a solution that could meet the needs of its Enterprise Project Management Office (ePMO), Engineering, and IT functions. Disconnected processes, inconsistent project information, and varying reporting requirements made it difficult to establish a unified approach to project and portfolio management.
MustardSeed helped the organization move beyond prolonged evaluation by clarifying the advantages, limitations, and practical implications of its PPM options. By providing the information and guidance needed to make an informed decision, MustardSeed helped leadership gain the confidence to commit to a platform and move toward implementation.
Working within a Smartsheet Control Center pilot, MustardSeed then helped tailor and expand the solution to address the organization’s operational requirements. The resulting framework standardized project intake and governance, connected project and financial reporting, introduced customized dashboards and automated workflows, and established a more consistent foundation for portfolio visibility across the ePMO, Engineering, and IT.
The company’s ePMO, Engineering, and IT functions each had their own ways of managing projects. Processes for project intake, governance, stage gates, and reporting varied across departments, and project and financial information was collected and maintained in different places. This made it difficult to bring everything together into a consistent, reliable view of the overall portfolio.
Without a common approach to managing projects and capturing information, leadership lacked the visibility needed to compare projects, measure performance across the portfolio, and identify where attention or intervention was needed.
The project started with a basic Smartsheet Control Center setup based on the company’s initial requirements. MustardSeed worked alongside the Smartsheet Build Architect to build on that foundation, making sure the platform could support how the ePMO, Engineering, and IT departments worked together.
The goal was to give each group the tools and flexibility they needed while making sure project information was captured consistently across the organization. That way, leadership could get a more complete and reliable view of the overall portfolio.
The solution included:
MustardSeed also created a central ePMO home page where employees could access project intake forms, dashboards, reporting, training materials, and other resources in one place. A dedicated help and training center made it easier for people to learn the system and find the information they needed.
To make day-to-day project management easier, MustardSeed also improved the project schedule layout. Columns were reorganized into a more familiar order, unnecessary information was moved out of the way, and important project details became easier to see without scrolling across multiple screens.
The solution created purpose-built views for project managers, directors, and executives, drawing from a consistent underlying project structure.
By standardizing how project information is captured across the three functions, the solution provides a more consistent foundation for comparing project performance and supporting portfolio-level reporting.
Several requirements extended beyond the organization's standard Smartsheet Control Center package. MustardSeed developed additional capabilities, including a structured enhancement request process, permission-based access for sensitive and NDA projects, program-level reporting, strategic priority tracking, and automated workflows to capture and manage future opportunities while preserving their history.
MustardSeed also implemented a standardized project naming convention that automatically generates unique identifiers, improving data consistency and reducing the risk of duplicate project names. Additional enhancements included guided workflows, automated PDF charter generation, and redesigned project schedules that made information easier to navigate and maintain.
The pilot transformed how project information is captured, managed, and reported across the ePMO, Engineering, and IT functions. MustardSeed replaced fragmented processes with standardized workflows, connected portfolio reporting, and customized dashboards, establishing a more consistent and reliable foundation for enterprise-wide project oversight.
While the initial implementation focused on the ePMO, Engineering, and IT, the architecture was designed for broader enterprise use. Standardized intake, governance, reporting, and data structures created a foundation that can be extended as additional functions adopt the framework, rather than requiring each area to build its own approach.
By connecting project governance, financial information, and reporting within a common enterprise framework, MustardSeed helped this food and beverage organization move beyond disconnected project processes toward more effective portfolio management. The three-function pilot established a scalable foundation for greater leadership visibility and more informed enterprise decisions.
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