Understanding project progress at a glance

BOK Financial improves project visibility across stakeholders with Office Timeline

Whether serving individuals, businesses, or institutions, BOK Financial combines innovative digital solutions with hands-on human expertise to support each client’s financial growth.

Their ability to offer reliable services tailored to client goals and market conditions stems from having a secure, highly efficient infrastructure. This is partly a result of the project management office’s efforts, a team of 70+ professionals involved in both long-term and ad hoc projects.

The PMO partners with all technical teams and lines of business to plan and execute IT projects aligned with the bank’s strategic roadmap, impacting every financial product offering. While managing key initiatives at BOK Financial, the department lacked a standardized approach for communicating progress on large, multi-phase projects to executive leadership and other stakeholders.

Need for a time-efficient project timeline maker

When Amy Bales, Project Manager III, started working at BOK Financial, Office Timeline was already the go-to solution for executive meeting presentations. Before using Office Timeline, project managers had wrestled with the limited capabilities of Microsoft Project each time they had to consolidate complex, multi-year project data into an easily digestible PowerPoint slide.

“Trying to extrapolate from Microsoft Project into a Microsoft PowerPoint slide is a daunting task. Taking that information and condensing it down—not only for the overall plan, but also for sub-workstreams that are important at different times in that project—was a pain point for sure,’’ says Bales.

Much like project managers, executives work under tight time constraints. That’s why they prefer a clean timeline that enables them to see at a glance the status of a project over a detailed Microsoft Project visual.

The method the PMO historically used to communicate schedule progress was time-consuming, requiring manual updates whenever timelines changed. “We used a grid design with shapes and text added on top of the grid to illustrate the project phases and timeline. It was very difficult to maintain, adjust, and resize as the schedule shifted,’’ says Rick Lau, Project Delivery Manager.

It was clear they needed a tool that could do both — simplify the project timeline creation process for project managers and efficiently communicate updates to stakeholders across the company.

Getting started with Office Timeline

One day, a vendor visiting the company presented a beautiful-looking timeline, which made Lau curious about the tool used to create it. This led him to discover Office Timeline and do a small trial on a few of their projects in work. With positive feedback from project managers and sponsors alike, the Office Timeline add-in was adopted across the entire PMO team.

Bales had her first experience with Office Timeline while shadowing Lau. After a quick run-through of the tool, he asked her to update a monthly Steering Committee executive presentation. Thanks to Office Timeline’s intuitive layout, she was able to use it on her own in less than an hour. “It's a very short ramp up to being able to use it and feel confident in it,’’ she says.

Above all, Bales was impressed by the tool’s versatility in creating engaging, one-slide visuals that clearly outlined project work, offering a simpler alternative to Microsoft Project.

Her team now uses Office Timeline in several ways, from communicating the impact of delays and proposed recovery plans to guiding leadership and other teams through internal and external changes.

Another way the PMO leverages Office Timeline visuals is by including them in mass emails to keep everyone even slightly impacted by the project informed about progress. This helps internal and external stakeholders better prepare for upcoming changes and can also uncover potential issues the PMO needs to address to ensure project success.

“We do our level best to assess the impact, but being able to show the change work across time helps bubble up questions we weren't aware of, allowing us to address them in a timely manner,” says Bales.

Streamlining communication and increasing meeting efficiency

Using the Office Timeline add-in helps Bales and the rest of the PMO team keep executive meetings focused and within allotted time frames while delivering key project updates in an easy-to-follow format. “It allows us to remain respectful of everyone's time while giving them the information they need,” she says.

"We've used it for long enough that I don't know how we would be able to quickly demonstrate where we are in the project and what the forecast and work streams look like without a tool like Office Timeline.’’

Also, the tool’s swimlane functionality allows project managers to effortlessly create visually appealing, customized project timelines where specific workstreams or project phases get highlighted based on the audience. These visuals are used not only for leadership presentations but also to keep project teams engaged and maintain momentum.

In terms of the time and effort required to update project visuals, Office Timeline has been a complete game-changer for the PMO team. What once took more than an hour now takes only minutes, empowering project managers to create professional-looking timelines without assistance from subject matter experts. “In 15 minutes we can go in and have the timeline completely updated, polished, and ready to go.”

As for alternatives, the tool’s features make it a tough choice to beat. “It would be a pretty significant time investment to try and get something that matches what Office Timeline offers.”

Overall, Bales considers Office Timeline a great value for the investment, especially for its capacity to free project managers to focus on higher-value tasks. “We don't have a lot of time, unfortunately, to spend creating the story of the project and where we sit in the timeline. It's incredibly valuable to be able to do that quickly,” she says.

That’s one of the many reasons the PMO plans to make the tool part of their onboarding process for every new project manager joining the company.

About BOK Financial

BOK Financial is a leading U.S.-based financial corporation offering a wide suite of personalized wealth management, commercial, and consumer banking products and services.

BOK Financial’s network of regional bank brands operating across the American Midwest and Southwest strives to build long-lasting relationships with clients and drive positive change in the communities it serves.