On January 19, 2015, 80 teams of nonprofits and volunteer Project Managers sat down in a room to tackle the nonprofits’s most pressing organizational challenges at the Project Management Day of Service. During this one-day event, volunteers talked with their nonprofit partners about their greatest needs and identified potential projects to address those needs. From there, they selected one project and created a scoped project and an action plan for the nonprofit to take back to their organization.
Building on success
Following this event, HP Corporate Affairs decided to take their efforts a step further. HP and Taproot Foundation worked together to select three of the workplans resulting from the Project Management Day of Service and recruited teams to lead these projects.
HP ultimately selected three organizations to support based on the size and strength of their scopes:
- National Resource Society of Women Veterans, a nonprofit organization specializing in helping women veterans transition into the working world.
- Career Catchers, a nonprofit organization dedicated to working with disadvantaged residents of the Washington area and supporting each client as they move along the self-sufficiency continuum.
- Stop Hunger Now, a nonprofit organization dedicated to ending hunger in our lifetime.
Looking towards the future
Each of these organizations was faced with a critical IT challenge. HP recruited their expert Project Managers and IT talent to form three teams to address these organizational needs. HP teams and nonprofits will work together to resolve these IT challenges, including: an assessment of all IT systems to increase efficiency in operations; establishing requirements for a new CRM system; and modeling current and future enterprise architectures.
HP Pro Bono is part of HP Living Progress: creating a better future for everyone through our actions and innovations. Through the PM Day of Service, HP was able to best capture the breadth and depth of project management talent at the company. The event was the ideal opportunity to identify partner nonprofit organizations with needs in their area of expertise and turn these into pro bono projects. As a result, HP employees are not only building new relationships with fellow employees in the company and nonprofit partners in the community, but using the skills they hone every day at HP to help these organizations tackle their biggest IT challenges.
