TreasureMap by Buried Wins — Benchmark Transcript #3 Deal Status: Closed Lost (chose ProjectCommand) Contact: David Park, Chief of Staff Contact Company: Orion Financial Group Interview Date: February 24, 2026 --- Buried Wins Moderator (00:00:08 - 00:00:14) David, thanks for joining. How are you today? David Park (00:00:14 - 00:00:17) Doing well, thanks for having me. Buried Wins Moderator (00:00:18 - 00:00:30) Great. We're conducting research on how teams evaluate project management solutions. Everything is anonymized. Mind if I record? David Park (00:00:30 - 00:00:32) Not at all, go ahead. Buried Wins Moderator (00:00:34 - 00:00:40) Tell me about your role and team. David Park (00:00:42 - 00:01:22) I'm Chief of Staff at Orion Financial Group. We're a mid-size financial services firm, about 600 people. I report directly to the COO and my job is basically making sure strategic initiatives actually get executed. We have a central PMO of six people who oversee about 30 active projects at any given time — everything from technology modernization to regulatory compliance to office consolidations. The stakes are high because a lot of these projects have regulatory deadlines that can't slip. Buried Wins Moderator (00:01:24 - 00:01:30) What was driving the evaluation? David Park (00:01:32 - 00:02:08) We'd been using a combination of tools that had grown organically. Different departments had their own setups. The COO wanted a single platform that gave her portfolio-level visibility — she wanted to log in and see red, yellow, green across all 30 projects without asking anyone. We also needed better resource management. We kept discovering that the same senior people were committed to four projects simultaneously and nobody knew until something broke. Buried Wins Moderator (00:02:10 - 00:02:16) Who did you evaluate? David Park (00:02:18 - 00:03:00) ProjectCommand was the frontrunner from day one because our consulting firm recommended them. They work with a lot of financial services companies and ProjectCommand is kind of the standard. We also looked at TreasureMap, which came up through a peer recommendation. And we did a quick look at QuickPlan early on, but it was clear within the first week that it wasn't built for our scale or our compliance requirements. So it was really ProjectCommand versus TreasureMap. Buried Wins Moderator (00:03:02 - 00:03:10) Tell me about the ProjectCommand evaluation. David Park (00:03:12 - 00:04:18) ProjectCommand checked every box on our requirements list, and we had a long list. Portfolio dashboards, resource management, custom workflows for different project types, audit trails for compliance, executive reporting. The demo was comprehensive — they clearly understood financial services and the regulatory dimension. They've done implementations at firms similar to ours and could reference those without naming names. The implementation timeline was long — they quoted 14 weeks — but given what we were deploying, that felt reasonable. They assigned us a dedicated solutions architect who'd done three similar deployments. The pricing was the highest of any option but leadership expected that for an enterprise tool. The brand gave the COO confidence. She'd heard of ProjectCommand. That matters more than people think. Buried Wins Moderator (00:04:20 - 00:04:26) Were there any concerns with ProjectCommand? David Park (00:04:28 - 00:05:12) The complexity, for sure. I personally found the interface overwhelming. There are so many configuration options that you need training just to navigate the settings. Our PMO team was fine with it — they're experienced project managers. But the project leads out in the business units who need to update status and log risks? They struggled in the pilot. We ended up having to run two training sessions just to get basic adoption. I worry we'll have ongoing adoption friction with the less technical users. The cost is also significant — we're committed for three years. If this doesn't work, that's a painful sunk cost. Buried Wins Moderator (00:05:14 - 00:05:20) How did TreasureMap compare? David Park (00:05:22 - 00:06:28) TreasureMap actually surprised me. The initial demo was more focused on our specific workflows rather than just running through a feature checklist. The interface was noticeably cleaner than ProjectCommand — less intimidating, which I thought would help with adoption across the business units. The setup was faster too. They had us running a pilot in about two weeks, compared to the months ProjectCommand needed. My PMO team liked the reporting capabilities and said they were comparable to ProjectCommand for 80 percent of what we needed. The support during the trial was excellent — fast, knowledgeable, and they clearly wanted to understand our use case. Cost was significantly lower, probably 40 percent less than ProjectCommand for comparable coverage. Buried Wins Moderator (00:06:30 - 00:06:36) So what tilted the decision toward ProjectCommand? David Park (00:06:38 - 00:07:32) A few things. The COO had a strong preference for a vendor with a deep track record in financial services, and ProjectCommand had that in spades. TreasureMap couldn't point to comparable references in our industry. That mattered because we have specific compliance and audit trail requirements, and the COO didn't want to be the guinea pig. The resource management module in ProjectCommand was also more mature — we could do capacity planning at the individual level, which TreasureMap didn't support as deeply. And honestly, recommending a less well-known vendor to the C-suite is a risk. If ProjectCommand fails, nobody blames me for choosing the market leader. If TreasureMap had failed, that's on me. That's the reality of enterprise buying. Buried Wins Moderator (00:07:34 - 00:07:42) If TreasureMap had those financial services references and deeper resource management, would that have changed the outcome? David Park (00:07:44 - 00:08:16) Honestly, it might have. The day-to-day experience was better in TreasureMap. Easier to use, faster to deploy, better support. If I could have shown the COO three firms like ours running TreasureMap successfully, that would've neutralized the risk concern. And if the resource management module was on par with ProjectCommand, I'd have had a hard time justifying the price premium. But those gaps existed and in our environment, proven track record and depth of features for our specific use case won out. Buried Wins Moderator (00:08:18 - 00:08:26) Any other competitors come up during the process? David Park (00:08:28 - 00:09:02) Nexus PM was mentioned by our technology team but it was a non-starter for the PMO. Too developer-focused. Our project managers took one look and said no. It's a good product for engineering teams but it has no understanding of how a financial services PMO operates. We didn't even get to a formal evaluation with them. Buried Wins Moderator (00:09:04 - 00:09:12) Looking back, anything you'd share with the TreasureMap team? David Park (00:09:14 - 00:09:48) Build your reference base in regulated industries. Financial services, healthcare, government — anywhere that compliance and audit trails matter. The product is genuinely good. Better day-to-day experience than what we bought, honestly. But in enterprise sales, the product alone doesn't win. You need the proof points and the industry credibility. If they'd had two financial services case studies and a more mature resource planning module, this would've been a much harder decision. Maybe a different one. Buried Wins Moderator (00:09:50 - 00:09:54) Really appreciate the candor, David. Thank you. David Park (00:09:54 - 00:09:56) Of course. Good luck.