Messer Construction Company, headquartered in Cincinnati, OH, has continuously operated since 1932. With seven regional offices, Messer’s impressive client base includes hospitals, education facilities (K-12 & higher education), aviation, arts & entertainment, religious, historic renovations, non-profit, industrial and commercial organizations.

Messer tackles the backlog challenge

With the age old issue of too much to do and too little time to do it, Messer was challenged with an increasing IT project backlog and a fixed number of resources to meet that demand. Messer initially went down the path of creating spreadsheets to handle their growing list of projects and found the approach limiting. As such, Messer needed a better means of qualifying business value, prioritizing projects, utilizing resources, and communicating project status to the organization.

Solution needed to be quick and easy

Messer had already been fighting the challenge of meeting business needs with fixed resources. As such, they did not have the capacity or energy for a long or costly implementation. After an enthusiastic endorsement from another company based in Cincinnati, OH, Messer discovered that Portfolio IntelligenceSM could provide the benefits they needed in a solution that is:

• Hosted
• Low cost and low risk
• Easy to implement and easy to use
• Quick to return an investment

Gary Thomas, Director of Business Technology Services for Messer, was able to implement Portfolio Intelligence in just a few weeks while still handling his other responsibilities. He relates that 3 Olive Solutions provides the “right tool set” for middle market companies. “Portfolio Intelligence is a solution that provides low entry costs, virtually no maintenance, and instant visibility to the project portfolio. Implementation was straightforward and quick. Portfolio Intelligence pays for itself immediately.”

Mr. Thomas continued, “Portfolio Intelligence fills a significant gap in the software market. Most packaged portfolio management solutions are geared to large Fortune 500 companies and do not scale well to mid-sized operations. Until 3 Olive Solutions introduced Portfolio Intelligence, our best alternative was costly custom developed solutions.”

Portfolio Intelligence Helps Align IT Efforts with Business Goals

Messer’s use of Portfolio Intelligence has helped IT to ensure that efforts accurately match up with business goals. Instead of making assumptions, each project is clearly aligned at the highest level. Says Thomas, “The dashboard views provide a quick and easy way to take a pulse of what is happening. With Portfolio Intelligence, we are able to map precisely which business plan goals each project supports.” He continues, “In addition, we can track many other Messer-defined attributes of our portfolio, providing the ability to accurately balance our investment in technology projects against those values that are most important to Messer.”

Additional Benefit of Improved Communications

Another advantage Messer has realized is in better communications and relations throughout the company. According to Thomas, “When demand exceeds capacity, there tends to be a perception of failure . . . not to mention the uncomfortable task of discerning one project over another. Portfolio Intelligence combined with good management practice provides a clear way to articulate the trade-offs in value, while promoting healthy discussions around IT resource capacity and deploying those resources to the most important projects in the company.” Messer’s team of Portfolio Intelligence users readily accepted their role in the process and is enthusiastic about how the solution has helped them toward their goal of increasing business value for the company.