Project Insight has announced that the Watershed Organisation Trust (WOTR) is successfully using its software for flexible, intelligent project management of its globally recognized efforts to bring clean drinking water to rural zones of India. The 200-person team relies on Project Insight to share project and task information in real-time from remote, developing areas of India.

In March, WOTR was named runner-up in The International ReSource Award for Sustainable Watershed Management, presented by global reinsurer Swiss Re.

Continual monitoring and assessment of WOTR's extensive protocols is key to the project's success, the organization said. The holistic approach adopted by WOTR (called "Wasundhara guidelines" for which it was awarded Kyoto Grand World Water Prize in 2009) is a participatory approach to watershed development that raises the bar of complexity.

Before using Project Insight, the organization was not using project management software. It had developed several in-house tools using Microsoft Visual Basic 6.0 and VB.NET technology to manage project data at central level, as well as using Microsoft Excel quite extensively at the field for primary data collection and analysis.

In April 2009, WOTR embarked on its most complex project to date, involving 25 villages (comprising 18,000 hectares) spread over 96.5 square miles, two agro-ecological zones, and 25 watersheds. WOTR was in desperate need of a robust, easy to use enterprise level project and portfolio solution that could be rolled out quickly and was easily customizable.

After an extensive search, WOTR selected Project Insight based on the capabilities it provided, specifically:
- Easy to implement, yet flexible enough to customize
- Knowledge of the real-time status of the project through collaborative, participatory communication and change management
- Ability to deal with project management laid out in complex systems
- Support and sharing of multi-stakeholder processes, integrating team strengths to handle multiple tasks
- Extensive document and file sharing abilities
- World-class support and learning framework
 

"Project Insight has enabled us to use project management to add activities and cross project lessons learned, as well as optimize costs and enhance research, while delivering value to the project owners, shared experiences and knowledge to the project teams and sustainable benefits to the communities we serve," said Sushil Bajpai, director of WOTR. "The teams who have been using Project Insight never fail to be surprised and inspired by its capabilities. Our project managers feel more empowered. Our processes have become more efficient and robust. We plan to integrate it with our accounting systems to become even more powerful."

By using Project Insight, WOTR said it has been able to successfully introduce project management concepts within its work culture, enabling real-time decision-making at all levels, better utilization of field resources and the ability to assess and monitor tasks for better performance. All of this has combined to result in significant cost reductions and improvements in certain efficiencies, where throughput has almost doubled since implementing Project Insight.

Project Insight has also enabled WOTR to roll out additional projects including its unique internationally supported Climate Change Adaptation (CCA) program. "While designing the CCA project, we were able to envision the activities, personnel configurations and possible duration of activities; however, integration of team efforts and implementing it in the field was a huge challenge,” said Vivek Rishi, WOTR manager. “Project Insight opened the door for us to take on this challenge."

Crispino Lobo, managing trustee of WOTR added: “Project Insight helps us to capture, process, track and institutionalize the productivity and cost reduction gains that we seek to achieve after each kaizen exercise we undertake in WOTR. It is a very powerful tool that helps sustain and drive lean management in selected processes and across sectors.”

For more information about Project Insight or WOTR, please visit www.projectinsight.net, or www.wotr.org, respectively.