Portland International Airport

The Port of Portland issued a request for proposal that sought “an independent objective assessment of the IT Department to evaluate appropriateness of organizational structures, optimize performance, improve quality, promote innovation and the effective and efficient use of internal and external resources, and to assist in the identification of future resourcing needs and sources.”

The results of this assessment enabled the Port of Portland IT Department (including PDX airport) to adapt to meet the increasing systems and technology needs of the Port and address the growing burden this effort is placing on existing IT staff. This project was particularly important as it provided a strategy for IT’s support to the large airport capital program and its significant portfolio of facility construction projects (over $2.5 billion). These capital construction projects require heavy involvement of IT staff during planning, design, construction and implementation and result in significantly more IT systems needing oversight, design, and ongoing operational maintenance and support.

The assessment results focused on five areas:

• IT Governance – developed and documented policies, procedures and the formation of a leadership committee for critical decision making for IT strategies, policies, resources, and initiatives.
• Staffing Model – evaluated current IT department staffing and skillsets to assess current and potential future capability gaps and recommend strategies to address them.
• Organizational Structure – developed a future IT organizational structure, taking into consideration the Port’s business needs, functional alignment, and management spans of control.
• Best Practice Business Process – Recommended process improvements to IT business practices including but not limited to change control, project management, project request intake, cost allocation, chargebacks, work effort prioritization, performance metrics, trouble ticketing, customer communications, and critical outage response/recovery processes.
• Cost Savings Opportunities – identified operational cost saving potential in IT areas including internal staff costs, platform consolidations, cloud services migration, retirement of aging systems, and external materials and services control.