But it did matter to other CityCenter stakeholders. Some had concerns about using a hosted project management system from an unknown vendor that would be storing sensitive financial information off-site.
"We were initially reluctant" to consider the Skire system "because the core information would be stored on servers outside our company," says Bill Smith, president of MGM Mirage Design Group.
Such reluctance is not unusual. Many executives object to using hosted project management software, primarily because of connectivity and data security concerns. "Most of my clients like having the software on the premises," says Robert Charette, director of the enterprise risk management service at Cutter Consortium and president of advisory firm Itabhi Corp.
Bodner's push to sell his partners on Skire began with MGM Mirage's IT organization, which he invited to grill Skire executives regarding the company's financial background and security provisions. After Skire completed a 20-page questionnaire, a team of MGM Mirage security experts tried unsuccessfully to hack into the hosted system. That exercise, along with supportive references from Skire customers who were using the change-control and cost-reporting functions, helped clinch the deal between the CityCenter project team and Skire in October 2005. (Bodner and MGM Mirage officials declined to quantify the value of the agreement.)
MGM Mirage's IT organization also used an existing firewall and other security systems to help protect the Skire system, Tampas says.
So far, everyone is satisfied. "To date, we have not encountered any problems with off-site storage and have received backups of our data on a regular basis," says Smith.
From the Ground Up
Getting executives of the four companies to sign off on Skire was just the first hurdle for Bodner and his team. He and other project team members next had to gain buy-in from 30 top executives at the four companies on the configuration of the project flowcharts.
Once the executives agreed to the plans, Tampas created the flowcharts. From March through June 2006, Tampas entered flowcharts into the Unifier system with descriptions for each cost-reporting process being supported, including requests for information and submittals for material costs, she says.
The Unifier system is easy to use "because the user interface is consistent across whatever custom [business processes] are developed for a particular company," says Tampas. With an hour or two of training, users are prepared to enter project data, she adds.
The 350 users of the Skire software include all lines of CityCenter managers from the four companies, including the various cost-controls groups, and MGM Mirage's project accountants and chief financial officer, says Bodner.
The system's flexibility impressed users. Administrators such as Tampas can design workflows and data entry forms from scratch, says Bodner. And project leaders can grant team members access to functionality based on their roles and can "swap people in and out of those roles easily," he says.
The Unifier system went into production in July 2006. In the following weeks, Bodner's team received more than 100 phone calls from users with requests to make minor modifications to the system, "since they knew by then how flexible the system was," he says.
"We recommended to them that we hold off on making any changes until we'd gotten some results from using the system and began producing reports," Bodner adds. Ultimately, some modifications were made, including incorporating additional departments and people into the system, adding fields to the system's forms, and adjusting the workflow as processes were changed or simplified, says Bodner.