Travel Channel is the place for consumers to satisfy their urge to go, see and do. Through the engaging storytelling and unique perspectives of its on-air personalities, the Travel Channel creates travel content that inspires, entertains and taps into the human desire to experience new things, explore new places and engage with interesting people and cultures. It’s a condition known as the Travel Bug, and the Travel Channel encourages everyone to Catch It!

Travel Channel is available in more than 95 million US cable homes, and its high-definition simulcast, Travel Channel HD™ is distributed to more than 17 million. The website, TravelChannel.com, which serves as the network’s entertainment travel hub, averages more than 2 million unique users monthly and its mobile content platform, Travel Channel GO™, is a leading provider of quality mobile travel video and audio content. Travel Channel also manages the leading online travel blog, WorldHum.com.

Situation

Travel Channel had the need to optimize their project portfolio by centralizing all projects and resources to enhance collaboration.  Centralized visibility would allow them to better align with their corporate strategy, protect current projects from impacts, and help them identify and track their project decisions.  All of these disciplines were necessary in the early project selection stage to enforce better decision making and to ensure the right work was selected for execution. 

Travel Channel was committed to improving collaboration and ensuring that all project teams were properly informed.  Risk management was put into place to help project teams maximize project quality and ensure defined risks were not fully realized as issues.  Change requests were tracked to address schedule, budget and resource impacts.  Document management was also a key target for implementation. 

All documentation for projects from requirements through deployment would be tracked and stored to ensure document centralization, improve communications and increase team productivity. 

Objectives

The following objectives were put forth to establish an optimized portfolio and project management solution: 

· Implement portfolio management solution that will help decision makers score, analyze, align and implement the right projects into their portfolio

· Create business process flow standards and procedures

· Establish project management controls to trigger early identification of schedule, cost and resource constraints and increase stakeholder involvement

· Improve team collaboration and communication to ensure all team members are properly informed and all work is centralized

Solution

Travel Channel utilized the Quick Start approach created by EPM Live to implement their PPM implementation.  The Quick Start approach is an innovative deployment methodology utilizing industry best practices to accelerate configuration and leverage key system capabilities to design solutions that specifically fit the needs of   Travel Channel’s business structure.  This approach allowed Travel Channel to leverage out of the box features and build as they go, giving them a customized solution with a rapid time to market. 

The Travel Channel system features EPM Live's Project Publisher tool, which provides Travel Channel with the ability to create all schedules in Microsoft Project and then publish them directly to Microsoft SharePoint.  EPM Live’s Project Publisher has allowed project managers to leverage the tools they already know yet extend the capabilities to provide bidirectional, real-time updates on project status.  EPM Live has allowed Travel Channel to evolve their SharePoint environment to a more comprehensive project and work management solution,  putting the process and controls in place to closely monitor project budget, resources, team communication and schedule performance.  

Travel Channel is also leveraging EPM Live timesheets to track project time and actuals.  “We would have not been able to transition from a privately held company to a publicly held company while meeting all Sarbanes-Oxley requirements without EPM Live timesheets.”  - Sarah Sartori, Sr. Manager, IT Program Management Office

This implementation is only representative of the 1st phase in Travel Channel’s PPM deployment.