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fairlife

About fairlife

fairlife is a Chicago-based dairy manufacturing company on a mission to deliver advanced nourishment to its customers, better care for its dairy animals, and advanced environmental sustainability. Founded in 2012, with national distribution launching in 2015, fairlife has boomed since, resulting in its acquisition in 2020 by Coca-Cola. In 2021, the business hit $1B in annual sales. The business continues its expansion with a brand-new facility in New York and a growing team.

In 2019, Fleur Mowlam was hired as a Project Management consultant with fairlife, leading to an engagement with pmo365 in 2020. After five years with pmo365 fairlife has gone from an Engineering pilot rollout to the product being embedded at the core of the company’s manufacturing and capital operations.

fairlife Requirements.

Requirement 1: Visibility Across Projects

In 2019, fairlife identified a need for more structured project management to oversee its dairy manufacturing operations. The company engaged Fleur to implement Microsoft Dynamics365 for a greenfield project in Arizona. After this initial rollout, it became clear the business was suffering from a lack of PM skills, knowledge, and processes across the organization, resulting in a lack of visibility across projects. 

Requirement 2: Governance Across Initiatives

When project management styles and tools differ among teams, there is a lack of overarching governance in how projects are managed. Bringing all projects, teams, tracking, financial oversight, and compliance objectives under one banner ensures governance across initiatives, with clear guidelines.

Requirement 3: Tools to Support Product Performance

While Dynamics365 offers project management, there are tools better equipped to perform project portfolio management and support product performance from a Project Management Office perspective. Finding the right-fit software was a key requirement; a tool with advanced capabilities that could grow and scale, with usability at its core.

Requirement 4: User Buy-In

User focus and user buy-in are critical to a new tool’s success. Without engagement sessions and direct input when building workflows, users can have a poor view of the software and even seek out workarounds. The ability to customise a tool was a high-priority requirement in fairlife’s phase one rollout.

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Solution 1: Introduce pmo365

To bring pmo365 to the business, Fleur highlighted the clear value in its initial product offering. These four factors were the foundations of the first wave of the program:

  • Improved centralised project tracking
  • Single source of truth
  • Advanced reporting capabilities 
  • Strategic approach to project management
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“It’s striking how clear it is to you that you build it with the user, not force it on the user. They need to like it. They need to see the value, specifically focusing on simplicity and reducing admin.”

Derek Halawa, Client Services Manager, pmo365

 

Solution 2: Customise, customise, customise

In the first wave of the pmo365 solution, fairlife heavily customised the system to present a solution that made sense to engineers - the initial users of the software.

To optimise the system during this first wave, fairlife opted for 6 co-managed sprints, followed by self-managed sprints to work through the required business processes at the initial level. The system was tailored specifically to these initial users, to ensure user buy-in and to help build excitement around the product.

pmo365 - Resource Management

Solution 3: Iterate on building the pmo365 solution

Beyond the first wave of the pmo365 rollout to engineers, fairlife has been able to iterate on the project portfolio management process with ongoing iteration and a full second wave rollout in 2025.

This means expanding to the enterprise: implementing more governance protocols, adopting a project and change management culture, and giving project managers across the organisation a toolkit and framework to leave them poised for success in their roles.

Continuous Improvement teams run 90-day checks on large projects to incorporate new findings into the system.

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Solution 4: Expand to capture multi-million project, multi-year projects 

From the initial solution, with 30 users, the system now supports 300 users. It’s an enterprise-wide solution that requires far more maturity than the initial rollout but has been built to scale with careful iteration.

What maturation means for fairlife has been reducing the level of customisation to a more generic build that fits all projects and portfolios. The system is now simple for everyone to use but returns the best value for management. The key to the solution’s ongoing success lies in the ability to manage multi-million dollar, multi-year projects with sophistication and simplicity.

fairlife pmo365

The Benefits

 

Benefit 1: Transparency Across the Organisation

pmo365 brings transparency and visibility into projects, resources, timelines, and associated data - across the whole organisation, in a structured view. What this means is that anyone with knowledge of the tool is able to instantly grasp the state of projects, risks, budgets, and more.

This increased transparency means there is no longer a need to request and wait for reports, no need to double-check the data, and no need to keep following up with key staff. Knowledge is not lost when someone leaves the organisation.

Benefit 2: Accountability for Projects and People

With pmo365’s better drill-down tracking and reporting, it’s easier to see where there are bottlenecks, where there is capacity to take on more work, or where outside assistance is necessary. With the level of data surfaced in pmo365, it is possible to catch small issues before they become big problems and assign the right resources to remediate the situation.

By using the language of people within the organisation, project management becomes a built-in helper system, rather than a completely new ideas framework to learn.

Benefit 3: Better Project Management

Thanks to the positive mindset in users and product adoption over the past few years, fairlife’s people are now becoming better project managers and suggesting tool improvements to get more out of their processes, reporting, and data collection activities.

This symbiotic relationship means that employees mature in their roles and the tool matures along with them. Tool education has been a key component to success, with Fleur travelling internationally across sites to ensure all teams have full coverage on their roles and responsibilities within the tool - and how to use it to their best advantage. 

The Future and Version 2.0

fairlife has experienced rapid growth in the five years that have passed since the introduction of pmo365. Now that version 2.0 of their internal solution is ready for release, the company is looking to go from strength to strength.  

With pmo365, fairlife is now able to capture large-scale operational efficiencies, perform accurate and detailed tracking, achieve prioritisation in line with capabilities and business goals, generate real-time useful and detailed reporting, and visualisation true accountability across the business. A maturing solution means fairlife can effectively grow profits, track and manage risk, and achieve faster, better business decision-making - three of the most critical strategic value goals in any enterprise.

“What we're now doing with this new version is there's infused AI, so there's a lot of Power BI reports driven by AI, making it super easy for reporting. The AI generator takes the information from last week, and this week’s activities, and checks over the health status to write a summary for you. So we're taking away some of the hard work from the PMs and really focusing on the things that matter, which is important.”

Fleur Mowlam, Director, Project Management for fairlife llc

 

 

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