PMO Coordination App

Scheduling and engagement tracking for a project management team that had no coordination software

When I took over the project management function and brought it into Solutions Delivery, the team was working with tools that had aged out from under them. There was no central coordination system, so people worked from personal spreadsheets and notepads. The scheduling calendar they relied on had been built years earlier off a legacy Outlook view and was deprecated in the new client, taking with it the ability to see and send placeholders for engineer engagements. The email templates that went to internal and external stakeholders at each stage of an engagement were blank, filled in by hand every time. And there was no view of what stage any engagement had reached, unless you opened CRM and read the comments.

Each of those was fixable on its own. Together they meant nobody could see the full picture of what the team was working on.

How it works

CRM stays the system of record. Contract lines, trip reports, historical records, and revenue recognition all have to happen there, so the engagement is worked in CRM as the source of truth.

A scheduled export of a defined CRM view lands on a network drive daily. The application picks that up and imports the changes, which keeps coordination current without anyone re-entering anything. Our CRM is the older on-premise system, so there's no live connection to build against, and a daily file drop is what the environment allows.

From there the application does the coordination work: a calendar for scheduling implementation engineers and third-party service partners, a view of every engagement and the stage it's at, prefilled stage templates in place of blank ones, and reminders for upcoming maintenance.

Confluence is the datastore. Each user authenticates with their own Atlassian token, so every change is attributed to the person who made it and not to a shared service account. Built with Claude and Claude Code, same as the other two.

Where it stands

In daily use by the PMO. Four people, which is the whole group it was built for.

What's next

It has a shelf life and I built it knowing that. A CRM and ERP replacement is coming that should absorb most of this, and at that point the application goes away. I built it anyway, because that project is twelve to twenty-four months out, and asking the team to work from personal spreadsheets for two more years to avoid building something temporary would have been the wrong trade.