Britannia Building Society - building a PPM community

 

Providing project management profiling to identify each practitioner’s level of capability to facilitate the identification of individual development needs, and inform corporate tactics and progress.

 

Opportunity

As part of Britannia’s drive to ensure the delivery of their corporate vision, they recognised a need to improve their project and programme environment. “To do this we first needed to understand how we compared to best practice,” says Chris Lazenby, Head of Business Improvement. “Working with CITI we undertook a comprehensive analysis of our change capabilities and project management competency."

"Once we had done that, we were able to recognise and build on our existing strengths and to pinpoint improvement opportunities”. These opportunities included: development of project manager and sponsor skills, and changing the way Business Improvement supported the project community in Britannia. The analysis also revealed scope to develop governance procedures, focus effort on project delivery practices, and improve consistency of approach across the organisation.

Approach

“We adopted the CITI project manager profiling assessment approach, to help us understand the current capabilities and development needs of each of our people. The output enabled us to devise tailored education programmes, with our project managers undertaking courses relevant to their level of knowledge, skills and experience."

"Our sponsors and senior managers are learning what they can expect of professional project managers, and conversely what the project management community expects of them.” At the same time as the development programmes were under way; CITI and the Business Improvement team began designing the Britannia project management guide. “…this intranet-based guide is already proving valuable,” says Chris.

“Our e:PMguide is a source of best practice for the whole project community, and an integral part of our project governance system.” Britannia launched its e:PMguide at the very first Project Management Forum meeting so that the community had to have a way for sharing actual experiences. “It had an immediate impact,” said Chris.

Outcome

The programme to create a coherent project community was deemed by all to be a success. Chris again, “CITI have proved to be a catalyst for us, enabling us to move forward with changes that deliver benefits, giving us focus and consistency in our projects."

"Although it is early days, we believe we are already in a much stronger position to meet the demands of change on behalf of our members, and that means everything to us.”