PMO: How Ascent Manages 1,500 Tasks with Perfony

The Problem

1,500 tasks, 40 stakeholders, and just as many places to look

Ascent Integration designs and installs turnkey assembly lines. Formed through the acquisition of Areva TA’s aerospace plant integration business and now part of the U.S.-based Ascent Aerospace group, the company got its start in the aerospace industry with the A350 and has since diversified into the rail and renewable energy sectors. With about 100 employees in Blagnac and 15 to 20 projects per year, the company serves clients such as Airbus, Alstom, and General Electric.

The business model is that of a systems integrator: each project is unique; the company does not mass-produce. Instead, it designs, outsources manufacturing, and oversees the entire process—from responding to the specifications through on-site installation and warranty service. The PMO plays a central role in this process: providing organizational structure, managing the schedule, and coordinating about twenty internal staff members, ten suppliers, and an equal number of client contacts, organized by project batches.

The problem was never about generating information—the team produced plenty of it. The problem was finding it. The tasks resulting from these discussions were scattered across separate tools: a weekly email listing each person’s tasks, an Excel file for client milestones, and another for each supplier. Taken individually, each one did the job. Together, they created fragmentation: to get an overview of a single batch, you had to open several sources and consolidate them manually.

And all it took was one unopened email for an action to slip under the radar: a PMO manager who is constantly traveling to client sites can quickly accumulate about a hundred unread messages. As a result, the PMO manager’s time was spent searching for, consolidating, and following up on these messages, rather than analyzing and managing projects.

The Solution

A single action database, regardless of which meeting they come from

The team has adopted a new approach: meetings are still organized separately based on their audience, but all actions resulting from them can be managed in one place. Four key decisions guide how the system is used.

1. One folder per type of contactOne folder for suppliers, one for internal meetings, and one for client meetings. Tasks are created in each folder during the meeting and remain there.
2. Milestone-specific meeting report templatesSpecific templates for client milestone reviews, with a title and table, to ensure the same chronology of events across projects.
3. Management by batch, not by meetingReports extract all tasks from a given batch—whether they come from a client milestone, an internal meeting, or a supplier—and present them in charts.
4. Charts shared with the entire teamEvery project member has access to the same dashboards, which ensures that account managers, project managers, and the PMO are all on the same page.

I type a word into the search bar and find the information—whether it’s a task or a report—all within a single tool. I find that incredibly powerful.

Julien Le Hel, PMO, Ascent Integration

What’s changing isn’t where actions are recorded. It’s the PMO’s ability to transform a multitude of scattered pieces of information into a actionable view of the project. By reducing the time spent searching, consolidating, and following up, Perfony enhances the PMO’s ability to do what it does best: anticipate, prioritize, and steer.

In fact, the team has set a voluntary limit: not everything is included in the tool. Small workshop tasks stay on a whiteboard or a Post-it note. Only items that truly pertain to project management are tracked there, to prevent the tool from becoming overly complicated.

The Customer Effect

Improve management to provide greater visibility for the customer

I have more control over who should do what and what still needs to be done.

Julien Le Hel, PMO, Ascent Integration

Tracking doesn't stop at Ascent's borders: it covers the entire chain, including internal actions, supplier actions, and actions expected from the client.

Sharing a common view of the situation becomes an integral part of the service provided: what’s been done, what remains to be done, and who is responsible. In fact, some clients rely on Ascent to handle this monitoring.

When the team presents its dashboards during project reviews, the message comes across immediately: “It’s organized; it’s under control.”

In a complex industrial project, this visibility not only makes the PMO's job easier— it also plays a key role in the relationship with the client.

Evidence

EN 9100 Audit: What if the auditor asks for proof?

Ascent Integration is EN 9100-certified: customer audits, internal audits, and an annual certification audit during which any project and its action plans can be thoroughly reviewed. Before Perfony, every deadline required the same routine. We had to gather all the action plans and update them—proof that they weren’t really being used between audits. And there were oversights: a plan that was forgotten, actions left in an email or a Word report, never followed up on. Action tracking was the subject of recurring concerns.

A week before the audit, this tool helps you avoid the stress of having to search for information in various places.

Julien Le Hel, PMO, Ascent Integration

During the last audit, we had to prove that an open task had been completed at a specific milestone. Since the reports are time-stamped, we were able to demonstrate this immediately, whereas an Excel file does not necessarily include a date. The auditor reviewed three projects; for all three, the team relied on Perfony, and task tracking went from being a weakness to a strength. The auditor’s reaction could be summed up in one word: “Wow, you have a really great tool.”

Ascent Integration did not implement Perfony to pass its audits, but to better manage its projects. The audit simply showed that the information was where it needed to be, when it was needed.

In a nutshell

The biggest advantage is having all the tasks and reports in a single tool. It’s a real time-saver, and it makes managing tasks much easier.

Julien Le Hel, PMO, Ascent Integration