There was a discussion in our company on similar lines, though before we went live. The idea was to group Production Support projects together using their name; Production Support - IT, Production Support - Marketing, Production Support - Workfront. etc. You get the idea.
I had (and continue to have) a philosophical difference with this approach - Name is not a classifier . By that, I mean that we shouldn't group things together just because they have similar names. Users should be free to change the name without a rippling effect.
To allow this classification or grouping, we created a Custom Field called Work Category and it had, among other options, Production Support.
We now use this field everywhere we would want to group or filter projects. It alleviates the need to replicate parsing techniques everywhere. However, it does means there's another field people have to populate.
I know I didn't answer your question directly, but this may prompt you to see if this is a viable option in your environment.