Project Information Portal

The U.S. General Services Administration (GSA), through its Public Buildings Service (PBS), manages projects for the housing of almost a million Federal employees. Projects involve renovations, restorations, and modernizations, as well as the construction of new buildings. PBS delivers its construction program through eleven regions across the country.

The PIP helps GSA to manage housing projects for almost a million Federal employees.

GSA headquarters in Washington, DC, establishes programming, design, and construction standards and guidelines for the regions. Doug Garnett-Deakin designed the Project Information Portal (PIP) to fulfill GSA’s need to have a centralized system for tracking the more than 5,000 projects throughout its 11 regions for over 14,000 users. Previously, the regions were using different methods of managing projects, from web-based tools, standalone databases to paper based system that involved printing and emailing fact sheets.

The PIP organizes housing projects that involve renovations, restorations, and modernizations, as well as the construction of new buildings.

The PIP is a web-based tool created for project teams to share information on prospectus and non-prospectus level projects with stakeholders. The PIP allows teams to resolve issues, track project funds and provide timely project status to executives and client agencies. Because of the PIP’s centralized set-up, users in any region can view information on projects across the country. The PIP also provides aggregate information on multiple projects, which is beneficial for executives.

The PIP allows teams to resolve issues, track project funds and provide timely project status to executives and client agencies.

The PIP integrates project data from legacy systems into a centralized system. This eliminates the duplicate data entry by project managers and increases data quality and accuracy. Much of the quantitative data in the PIP originates in other PBS enterprise systems (e.g., Oracle and SQL Server) and is pulled in on a nightly and weekly basis. Financial information about authorization and funding comes from the Capital Projects Program website. Basic building information and work item details come from the Inventory Reporting Information System (IRIS). Detailed Housing Plan information covering Tenants, Client Billing Records and a detailed breakout of occupants, usable and rentable square feet is pulled in from ABPNet. The RWA Search system provides data on the status of customer reimbursable work authorizations allocated by agency and bureau.

The PIP has full archiving capabilities and gives the user the ability to create Prospecti, Housing Plans, Obligation Plans, Comprehensive Project Plans, and Customer Communication Plans. Baseline and current data is available to track across budget, scope, milestones and schedules on project and program levels. Included in the PIP is a directory of all team members, customers, contractors, and GSA personnel.

The PIP has full data archiving capabilites for all of GSA's housing projects, allowing PBS users to track across budget, scope, milestones and schedules.

In addition to its online reporting capability, the PIP creates output in MS Word, MS Excel, Adobe pdf and XML formats.

All Representative Work

Testimonials:

HONORABLE MENTION WINNER as GSA Best Practice 2003 for Real Property Management. Begun as a web enabled project fact sheet, the Project Information Portal (PIP) has evolved into an enterprise-wide system for tracking an active capital construction program valued at over $10 billion.

The unique qualities of PIP are its graphically pleasing, highly intuitive user interface and easy to understand and navigate information architecture. From a program level overview to a detailed list of projects for each PBS region, the information is easy to find and easy to update. The display of a project, from its design renderings, construction photos, or completed project views, makes the portal a destination for anyone within GSA who wants to know the progress, images, and detailed data about a project.

Extensive report development has provided PBS executives with views across their regions and by customers that previously had been very difficult and time consuming to obtain. The PIP has helped PBS achieve its goal of keeping a “finger on the pulse” of a multi-billion capital construction program. PIP has achieved this by providing executive roll-ups of information, including a real-time dashboard of issues and actions for all projects in the portal.

Updating projects by the project managers takes less than 30 minutes per month. Cultural and organization resistance to change is gradually being overcome by continuing to establish communication, trust and confidence between the project manager, the executive and the customer. Communication builds trust, and trust builds confidence that the system will provide reliable and up to date information. GSA can expect to save almost $2.4 million annually, or about $12 million over a 5-year horizon when the PIP will be fully functional through reduced reporting requirements by project managers.