Making 100,000 tasks legible — inside MS Project for the PMs, and inside Power BI for the executives. Two audiences, two visibility layers, one infrastructure problem.
The Educational Testing Service (ETS) manages the creation and administration of standardized assessments, including the statewide testing program for Texas K-12 education. At that scale, a single program involves hundreds of projects and thousands of dependencies — and the PMO needs to give executives visibility into the portfolio without drowning them in task-level detail, while giving project managers the structural discipline they need to keep 100,000 interconnected tasks from cascading into each other.
I came into this engagement through PwC, hired specifically for the combination of Power BI skill and project management depth needed to improve two things simultaneously: the schedule management infrastructure that PMs depended on, and the reporting visibility that executives depended on. Two audiences. Two layers. One infrastructure problem.
PwC brought me in specifically for two things: the ability to manage a large, technically complex MS Project schedule at enterprise scale, and the Power BI skill to support the executive visibility layer that depended on it. Both required the same underlying discipline — knowing what information mattered to which audience, and making sure the system delivered it reliably.
The core work was PM delivery: maintaining the structural integrity of a 100,000-task master schedule, managing cross-project dependencies, hosting PMO meetings, and tracking risks across a program with real consequences if anything cascaded. Alongside that, I owned the data and UI management for the Power BI reporting layer that gave executives their view of the portfolio. Where capacity allowed, I contributed additional improvements to the infrastructure — custom fields, standards documentation, and the K-12 process reference guide.
Microsoft Project Web App at this scale is a different discipline than typical project management. A single misconfigured dependency relationship in a 100,000-task master schedule can cascade in ways that take days to untangle. The structural integrity of the schedule is not a background concern — it is the primary technical challenge, because a schedule that is structurally broken produces data that looks plausible but isn't.
Alongside maintaining the schedule, the PM work was ongoing: hosting PMO meetings, tracking risks and dependencies across projects, coordinating with project managers on cross-schedule relationships, and keeping the program moving through the complexity without losing structural soundness in the process.
Core delivery
Schedule integrity and PM execution
Maintained the master schedule and embedded sub-schedules across the PMO portfolio — dependency integrity, cross-project coordination, risk tracking, and the PM meeting cadence that kept the program moving. The technical and operational work were inseparable at this scale.
Additional contribution
Custom fields and views for portfolio visibility
Where capacity allowed, designed custom fields and reporting views inside MS Project that gave PMs an enterprise perspective without navigating 100,000 tasks manually. The right level of detail for the right audience, surfaced inside the tool they already used.
The Power BI dashboard was the executive visibility layer — translating the structural complexity of the MS Project environment into portfolio-level progress reporting that leadership could read and act on. I owned the data and UI management for that layer: maintaining the reporting model, managing the fields and logic the dashboard depended on, and ensuring the visualization stayed accurate and trustworthy as the underlying schedule evolved.
A dashboard is only as trustworthy as the data it draws from. Fixing data quality upstream — in the schedule itself — rather than in the visualization layer was the discipline that made the reporting reliable. Errors caught at the source are much easier to trace and much less damaging to executive trust than errors discovered in a report.
Data and UI management
Owned the data management and UI for the Power BI executive visibility layer — maintaining the reporting model, fields, and logic that the dashboard depended on. The executive view of the portfolio stayed accurate because the data feeding it was managed at the source.
Executive visibility model
Portfolio status, milestone progress, and risk indicators surfaced at the right level of detail for leadership decision-making — without requiring executives to understand MS Project or navigate a 100,000-task schedule themselves.
The schedule and Power BI work were the core of the role. Where time allowed, I contributed to the longer-term health of the PMO infrastructure — improvements that would outlast the engagement and reduce the overhead of maintaining the system going forward.
Schedule creation standards
Created and documented a standardized schedule creation process, including a primer that explained the strategic rationale behind each step — not just what to do, but why the model was built that way. Became the PMO reference document for new schedule setup across the organization.
Training materials
Developed training materials to improve schedule consistency across the organization — reducing the PMO overhead of correcting poorly configured schedules after the fact.
K-12 assessment process documentation
Created an onboarding reference guide explaining the K-12 standardized assessment item development process — how test items are created, reviewed, and validated — in plain language accessible to new team members. A complex, regulated workflow made legible to people entering it for the first time.
Managed a master schedule with 100,000+ tasks and individual embedded sub-schedules exceeding 10,000 tasks — maintaining structural integrity across thousands of cross-project dependencies throughout the engagement.
Owned data and UI management for the Power BI executive visibility layer — maintaining the reporting model and data quality so that the dashboard executives relied on stayed accurate as the underlying schedule evolved.
Hosted PMO meetings and managed risk tracking across a program with real consequences if schedule dependencies cascaded incorrectly.
Created a schedule creation standards document — including the strategic rationale behind each step — that became the PMO reference for new schedule setup across the organization.
Created an onboarding reference guide documenting the K-12 assessment item development process in plain language — making a complex, regulated workflow legible to new team members entering the PMO.