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.
This engagement came directly out of my work at TASB, where I had been building analytics infrastructure and PM governance processes that an IT director had tried to dismiss as outside my lane. PwC hired me for exactly those skills — Power BI reporting, schedule management discipline, and the ability to design systems that surface the right information to the right audience — at roughly triple the pay and on a program that dwarfed anything I had worked on before.
The work fell cleanly into two layers: making the schedule infrastructure work correctly for PMs inside MS Project, and making that data visible and trustworthy for executives through Power BI. Both required the same underlying skill — knowing what information mattered to which audience, and designing the system so that information could flow to them reliably.
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.
The visibility problem was equally real in the other direction: a 100,000-task schedule contains more information than anyone can usefully act on. The job was not just maintaining the structure but designing the views and custom fields that let each audience see exactly what they needed — and nothing more than that.
Structure
Master schedule integrity
Managed the master schedule and its embedded sub-schedules across the PMO portfolio — maintaining dependency integrity, coordinating cross-project relationships, and ensuring the structural model stayed trustworthy as programs evolved.
Customization
Custom fields and views for portfolio visibility
Designed custom fields and reporting views inside MS Project that enabled an enterprise perspective — PMs could see how their work fit into the portfolio, without needing to navigate the full 100,000-task master. The right level of detail for the right audience, surfaced inside the tool they already used.
Schedule data is only useful if it reaches the people who need to act on it in a form they can actually use. The Power BI dashboard served as 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.
The critical work happened upstream of the visualization. A dashboard is only as trustworthy as the data it draws from. I improved data quality by defining the fields, standards, and reporting logic that the dashboard depended on — so that by the time information reached a Power BI report, it had been validated at the source rather than corrected after the fact.
Data quality upstream
Defined the fields, standards, and reporting logic that the Power BI dashboard depended on. Fixed the data quality problem at the source — in the schedule itself — rather than trying to correct it in the visualization layer where errors are harder to trace and more damaging to trust.
Executive visibility model
Supported and improved the dashboard used for project progress visibility at the executive level. 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.
Custom fields and clean data models don't sustain themselves. Every new schedule created by someone who didn't know the standards was a new source of structural risk. The standards work — documentation, training, and the rationale behind each step — was the piece that made the visibility infrastructure durable rather than dependent on one person maintaining it.
Schedule creation standards
Created and documented a standardized schedule creation process, including a primer that explained the strategic business 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 creation across the organization.
Training materials
Developed training materials to improve schedule consistency across the organization. The goal: anyone creating a new schedule would produce something structurally sound the first time, reducing the PMO overhead of correcting poorly configured schedules after the fact.
K-12 assessment process tool
Designed and built an online learning tool that explained the K-12 standardized assessment item development process — how test items are created, reviewed, and validated. Improved onboarding and process consistency for new team members entering a complex, regulated workflow.
Managed a master schedule with 100,000+ tasks and individual embedded schedules exceeding 10,000 tasks — maintaining structural integrity across thousands of dependencies while keeping data useful for reporting at every level.
Designed custom MS Project fields and views that gave PMs an enterprise perspective inside the tool they already used — portfolio visibility without navigating 100,000 tasks manually.
Improved Power BI dashboard data quality by solving the problem upstream — defining fields, standards, and reporting logic at the schedule level so the visualization layer could be trusted.
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.
Built an online learning tool documenting the K-12 assessment item development process — improving onboarding consistency for new team members entering a complex regulated workflow.
This engagement was the direct validation of the analytics and PM work that had been challenged at TASB — PwC hired for exactly those skills, at enterprise scale, and the infrastructure built here outlasted the contract.