Breakthrough T1D gains a reliable portfolio view across systems with Project Insight

How Breakthrough T1D centralized project and portfolio data to improve visibility, prioritize work against goals and capacity, balance resources, and make better decisions across its technology organization.

Project Insight gives us that flexibility of having that centralized visibility across all our projects ... to be able to plan, to balance our workload, to make better decisions with standardized data.

- Francis Solomon-Knox, Sr. Director of Portfolio Management, Breakthrough T1D

Industry

Nonprofit Health Research & Advocacy

Employees

Approximately 500

Challenges

Project information spread across Jira, Monday.com, Smartsheet, spreadsheets, and other systems
No centralized view of project status, resources, and priorities across the technology portfolio
Significant time spent gathering and reconciling information for portfolio and executive reporting

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The Breakthrough T1D Story

Breakthrough T1D is a global nonprofit focused on type 1 diabetes research, advocacy, and improving the lives of people living with T1D.

Francis Solomon-Knox, Senior Director of Portfolio Management, leads portfolio management within the technology organization. His team supports work from project request through planning, execution, launch, and adoption, working across project managers, scrum masters, business analysts, technical teams, and business stakeholders.

With different teams using different tools and delivery methods, the portfolio team needed a better way to see the complete picture across all of that work.

The Challenge

Before Project Insight, Breakthrough T1D's technology teams worked across Jira, Monday.com, Smartsheet, spreadsheets, and other systems.

Those tools worked well for the teams using them, but they did not give Francis and the portfolio management team one reliable view across the technology portfolio.

To prepare portfolio and executive reporting, the team had to gather information from multiple systems and bring it together manually. That took time and made it harder to ensure the information across projects reflected the same point in time.

What Breakthrough T1D Needed

The team was looking for more than a project management tool. They needed a centralized portfolio management system that could also support project management, resource management, financial management, and benefits management, while still integrating with other systems.

That centralized view was critical because the team needed to see what was happening across the full technology portfolio, understand project status, and make better decisions about competing work.

Centralized Portfolio Visibility
One place to understand project status and see work across the technology portfolio.

Strategic Prioritization
A way to evaluate incoming requests against organizational goals, available resources, and capacity to decide what should be done now and what should wait.

Resource and Capacity Planning
Visibility into workload and capacity so teams could balance resources across competing priorities.

Connected Systems
The flexibility to integrate with systems such as Jira rather than requiring every team to abandon the tools they already use.

Why Project Insight

One of the most important requirements was the ability to work with Jira rather than replace it.

Breakthrough T1D's technical teams were already comfortable managing their day-to-day work in Jira. Project Insight gave the organization a way to connect that work to a broader portfolio management process.

Project information can move between Jira and Project Insight in both directions, allowing technical teams to continue working in Jira while giving Francis and the portfolio team the centralized visibility they need.

Combined with Project Insight's portfolio, resource, intake, financial, and reporting capabilities, that flexibility helped Breakthrough T1D choose a system that could support both team-level execution and portfolio-level oversight.

We were pleasantly surprised to hear that Project Insight can seamlessly integrate with Jira. We can pull the information from Jira into Project Insight and push information from Project Insight into Jira as well.

- Francis Solomon-Knox, Breakthrough T1D

What Changed with Project Insight

One Portfolio View: Project Insight gives the portfolio team centralized visibility across projects, even when teams continue managing day-to-day work in other systems.
Better Prioritization and Capacity Decisions: Incoming work can be considered against organizational goals, available resources, and capacity, helping the team decide what to take on now, what should come later, and how to balance workload.
Less Manual Reporting: The portfolio team spends less time gathering and reconciling information from Jira, Monday.com, Smartsheet, spreadsheets, and other systems before reporting to stakeholders and executives.
More Standardized Data: Centralized project information gives Francis and his team a more consistent basis for planning, workload balancing, and portfolio decision-making.

The Results

Project Insight did not require Breakthrough T1D to force every team into the same execution tool.

Instead, it gave the portfolio team one place to see and understand work across those different environments.

Francis says the centralized visibility helps his team plan, balance workloads, and make better decisions using more standardized data. It also reduces the time the portfolio team spends gathering information across systems.

The result is a more connected portfolio management process that supports better prioritization, stronger capacity decisions, and more dependable reporting across the technology organization.

We decided that Project Insight is the product for us to take us forward.

- Francis Solomon-Knox, Breakthrough T1D

Ready to connect project data across teams and tools?

Project Insight brings project, portfolio, resource, capacity, and reporting data together so PMO leaders can see the complete picture of work without forcing every team into the same system.

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