Larry Shutzberg has served as vice president and chief information officer for Rock-Tenn Company since 1986. From October 1982 to October 1986, Mr. Shutzberg served as senior management consultant for Accenture (formerly Anderson Consulting). Prior to 1982, Mr. Shutzberg served as an internal auditor with Coopers & Lybrand and is a certified public accountant. He is a graduate of the Ohio State University with a dual degree in accounting and computer information systems.

Rock-Tenn Company is one of North America's leading manufacturers of packaging products, merchandising displays and recycled paperboard. In early 2002, it was determined that an enterprise project management (EPM) solution was needed primarily for aligning IT with Rock-Tenn’s seven business units. Senior Management wanted visibility into and accountability for IT initiatives. IT wanted to make sure its activities were appropriate, important and beneficial to the businesses. To achieve this, IT needed new processes and a toolset to provide accurate data and reporting.

Rock-Tenn selected Microsoft Project Server 2002 and struggled with the initial implementation, at times concerned that they would have to implement another toolset. Instead, they elected to bring in a Microsoft partner, PM Resource Group, and were able to turn things around. Over the past two years, Rock-Tenn's IT group, consisting of 25 project managers and 100 team members, has been using Microsoft Office Project Server, Microsoft Office Project Professional, a custom-developed extension to Microsoft Project Server, and other supporting tools to create almost 1,000 projects to support the business units.

In February 2004, Rock-Tenn upgraded to Microsoft Office Project Server 2003 and has expanded its EPM solution to achieve additional benefits. These benefits include:

• Improved project planning through standardized processes and templates (including the implementation of a PMO),
• Use of a custom-developed, Windows SharePoint Services-based solution to consolidate various work request systems and achieve Sarbanes-Oxley compliance,
• Enhanced resource management through 100% time reporting compliance against project and non-project (i.e., support, admin) activities, and
• Improved cost reporting by tracking resource and capital costs on all projects.

Rock-Tenn is continually expanding its EPM solution. This includes currently developing a process to allow Microsoft Office Project Professional to capture and report resource costs that must be capitalized in order to meet accounting requirements. They are also in the process of developing an archive solution with cross-instance reporting. Additionally, their project managers will be evaluating the benefits achieved through Windows SharePoint's team collaboration features such as communicating project-related issues, risks, documents, announcements, calendar of events, discussion threads, and lessons learned surveys. The project managers will also explore improving future planning efforts through baselines, and earned value reporting in Project Web Access. Finally, they will continue to extend their custom-developed extension to Microsoft Project Server to account for some of the deficiencies with the current Microsoft solution.

Since this is a powerful enterprise project management solution, an organization often encounters struggles from a cultural and technical learning perspective in implementing all of the capabilities. However, the benefits far outweigh the struggles. The chief benefit of this solution is that senior management can gain visibility into what IT is working on. This includes the ability to understand time spent on IT projects versus support and maintenance, how much time and money is involved in specific initiatives, what resources are needed, as well as many additional metrics. Accordingly, senior management has a much better understanding of IT and what it accomplishes and IT management has a tool to help plan, manage and track their efforts on everything they do. Rock-Tenn greatly benefits from continuous access to and visibility of PMO data and anticipates the evolution of the toolset used to further leverage the benefits that are possible.

Rock-Tenn’s PMO effort is continuous, for as soon as one goal is achieved, there is a new requirement that forces them to move to the next level.  Fortunately, they have the right solutions and a team in place to support them in meeting their current and future IT PMO needs.