LifeWay Christian Resources was established in 1891 as a way to supply theological content for churches that were in high demand of teaching materials for Southern Baptist Churches. Since then, LifeWay has developed over 186 storefronts and continued to provide teaching materials for students in a way that utilizes modern technology and encompasses an extended network of Southern Baptist churches that LifeWay supports through their IT department. The LifeWay IT unit, maintains a website, mobile applications on multiple platforms, and supports a publishing house for printed materials.
LifeWay distributes resources in over 120 countries and the IT team has led the charge to standardize processes and prioritize projects to drive maximum value for their organization. As a non-profit organization, it was critical to have executive buy in for large investments, and quick wins were realized in the early adoption phases. As LifeWay began standardizing on Innotas and creating processes, the advantages of having a centralized project portfolio management system became clear.
Project Prioritization which enabled the team to focus on higher impact projects first ensuring resource efficiency and increased value contribution to the company. The result increased customer success.
- “If you want to prioritize your corporate strategic investment, you need to prioritize the projects in order to maximize your return. Innotas is helping us do that.” -Randy Alsup, Director of PMO at LifeWay
Integrated Application Portfolio with their PPM solution. This was very helpful in seeing the projects and workload across the enterprise as opposed to siloed viewpoints. The application management at LifeWay includes both internal and external, outward facing applications for mobile devices.
Automated System Integration to keep information together and have relevant data available. The team was able to pull all information such as time tracking and project status updates, and get real-time reports and dashboards to reflect the information that was important to them.
Budget Reporting kept their projects on track and easy to reconcile. As a non-profit organization, it is essential that budgets are forecasted and allocated effectively. The team realized that not only did budget tracking become streamlined, but the more information they put into the system, the easier it was for them to reconcile and report.
In all, the team at LifeWay is making large strides in their Project Management Office (PMO). By having full support of executive leadership, they were able to quickly get up and running and take advantage of their system. We look forward to continuing our support of LifeWay to help them stay on the right track with portfolio management.
To find out more about how the IT team is leading the way for project and application management at LifeWay, take a look at our recent case study.
“The implementation manager drove toward a set of milestones allowing us to work at our own pace, which was very rapid. There were a number of different channels we were able to tap if we needed support – online community, e-mail, phone, etc. so we didn’t lose momentum during the critical adoption phase. He was incredibly experienced and knowledgeable about the product making suggestions for us based on our business. It made all the difference.” – Randy Alsup, LifeWay
