Founded in 2001, California-based Veros Real Estate Solutions, LLC (Veros®) provides valuable products and services to a wide range of housing finance professionals. The organization offers a full suite of real estate property valuation, data and analytics, and collateral risk management solutions for mortgage lenders, servicers, rating agencies, investors, government-sponsored entities and more.
Projects are largely information technology infrastructure or software development-related, and the project management team works closely with different business units across the company, so cross-departmental collaboration and communication play a key role in the organization’s success.
We caught up with Michele Fazio, Senior Vice President of the company’s Project Management Office (PMO), to find out how Veros has been using Hive to manage day-to-day operations as the company scales and evolves.
How Veros managed its day-to-day workload before adopting Hive
When Fazio joined Veros in 2015, the project management team was not using a specific project management tool. Fazio and the team adopted another tool, which they used for six years. During this time, Veros grew and evolved, so Fazio and the team began looking for a more robust project management solution to help them meet the demands of their changing workload. They transitioned to a new project management system but found it did not have the functionality to support how they wanted to work.
“I spent 50-60% of my time just managing the administrative functions of the new platform, just so that people could use it in the way that they wanted to,” Fazio explains. “So, we quickly began looking for a better solution.”
Veros researched five different project management platforms, exploring their functions and capabilities. Hive stood out to Fazio due to its strong project management functionality and its ability to streamline cross-departmental collaboration.
When Fazio discovered that Hive’s External Users App would enable her to bring people from other outside Hive into her workspace, she saw the potential to create meaningful efficiencies.
Now in their second year of using Hive, Fazio and the project management team have automated over 75% of their project set-up processes and successfully onboarded other teams into the PMO’s Hive workspace.
“Our Legal and Compliance team are now working in Hive, and we’ve got them up and running on a vendor management platform, so we can manage all our vendors within Hive,” Fazio adds. “We’ve also extended Hive to IT & Dev and are in the process of onboarding them now.”
Fazio has also moved their CAB (Change Advisory Board) process into Hive, streaming it with a form and approval process. Hive has made it possible to go from a completely manual process to 75% being automated and tracked within the platform.
How projects are organized in Hive
Projects at Veros are mainly information technology infrastructure or software development based. The project management team uses Hive templates to get new projects up and running quickly.
Project Managers (PMs) create new projects using a range of custom project templates, which prepopulate key information, such as tasks, custom columns, and different project views. PMs then input project-specific information, such as project dates and make any necessary changes to customize each new project. PMs also use action card templates for routine actions, such as reminders and project customization. PMs are able to quickly adapt any project plan to meet specific needs with Hive’s built-in functionality, allowing them to spend more time focused on their teams.
Fazio highlights that before using Hive, PMs and the legal team kept track of reminders, such as upcoming contract renewals and vendor reviews via Excel. Now that they are using Hive, they’ve built these reminders into their project templates, so everything can be easily tracked within Hive.
Overseeing work with Project Views
Hive provides a wide range of viewing options for users to oversee ongoing project work. Fazio explains that Portfolio View, which enables users to look at multiple projects at the same time, is frequently used by the team.
“From a PMO perspective, Portfolio View is ideal, and from a management perspective, I use the analytics and the resourcing views as well as Portfolio View,” says Fazio.
Using Hive Forms
The PMO uses customized Hive Forms to gather information from people internally or externally for a variety of use cases, including project intake, annual reviews and audit requirements. Fazio and the team have set up custom forms to automatically create action cards in Hive with all the form details automatically populated, reducing the need for manual input.
“Everything is set up in Hive, from form submission to conducting due diligence on annual reviews and meeting audit requirements. We’re now at the point where processes are over 75% automated. So, using Hive takes a lot of that inefficiency and manual overhead out of the picture,” explains Fazio.
Conclusion: The main benefits Veros finds with Hive
Hive has been key in helping the project management team cut time-consuming manual input by automating their project set-up and intake by using templates and custom forms. Fazio also highlights how easy Hive is to work with as a company and how happy she’s been with customer support.
“We’re now in year two of working with Hive, and it’s been absolutely fantastic. Honestly, your customer service and your support is unmatched in the industry, at least from my experience. From my perspective, it’s been a phenomenal relationship, and the product itself is a great fit for our needs. Hive is ahead of the curve. You all are consistently releasing new functionality that adds value to what we’re doing,” she concludes.
So, what’s next for Veros and Hive? Fazio says the team plans to move the information technology ticketing system into Hive. The company currently has three different platforms for ticketing and plans to consolidate them into just one on Hive.
© 2024 Veros Real Estate Solutions (Veros®), a Veros Software company. All rights reserved. For more information on Veros, visit www.veros.com
