Industry – Utilities
Overview
While attempting to replace a key billing system the client found the programme significantly over-budget and unable to deliver on time. With no clear plan that provided the stakeholders a view of the remaining deliverables, milestones, timeframe and required budget, the client needed help in understanding why the issues had occurred and then how to get the programme back on track.
The Challenge
The client sought help from Enable Consulting in order to perform a Programme Health Check and then to provide recommendations on how to recover the programme.
The Solution
Enable Consulting tailored a programme health check to perform a rapid assessment of the failing programme and came up with a set of proposals to help recover the situation. Given that the programme was already identified as in trouble it was possible to quickly hone in on the trouble spots and identify the correct remediation.
At the conclusion of the assessment, Enable Consulting presented the Health Check findings and a list of project and program management improvements that would address the specific “pain points” within the programme in order to help prevent further deterioration in execution. Included with the list was a roadmap for implementation of these enhancements. A key outcome of the assessment was a requirement of ensuring that the Client was able to understand exactly how much remained of the initial implementation, and also what it was going to cost.
The Result
The specific areas in this case that were found to be problematic were:
Stakeholder Engagement – The key stakeholders did not feel part of the delivery process and as a result did not understand their role in helping to support and enable the delivery.
Programme Delivery – The programme director was trying to run the programme as a project and as a result was not able to see the bigger picture. This resulted in poor coordination between the programme streams, duplicated work and missed dependencies.
Project Reporting – There was no integrated programme management tool which resulted in each project reporting in an adhoc manner. This was also a contributory factor in the Programme Delivery issues.
As a result of the assessment Enable Consulting were able to provide some additional Programme Management support and set up a Project Management Office (PMO) to ensure the appropriate governance and methodology were applied to the Programme. This governance ensured that the stakeholders were brought into the programme and enabled them to support the delivery.
With the implementation of a PMO and the injection of an experienced Programme Manager the programme was able to forecast remaining spend and timeframe, rebaseline the programme and provide a firm number enabling application for a budget increase. This provided confidence that the rest of the programme would be delivered to the new baseline and budget.
The programme was ultimately delivered to the new baseline and the new system was able to help streamline key client facing business processes.