Lloyds TSB - thoroughbred development for PMs

 

When Lloyds TSB Group IT were looking to put in place project management development for their already experienced project managers they had three particular concerns:

 

Opportunity

• It must put into practice the lessons learned from recent large in-house projects

• It should address the specific concerns faced by the IT project managers while at the same time emphasising the need to maintain the ‘big picture’, business perspective, and

• The development should support the delegates in their case to be considered for Certificated Membership of the Association for Project Management (APM).

Approach

Like many of our large financial services clients, Lloyds TSB has business and IT specific project manager resource pools. The functionalisation of major projects or programmes is a common solution to the need to simplify the management structures and ‘carve up the elephant’ into manageable chunks. In the engineering industry this is often achieved through the distinction of management responsibilities throughout the project life-cycle.

For example, senior project managers define the project, take responsibility for up-front contract management then hand over to project managers who take responsibility for the plan to execution phases. In both these models the concern remains – how do you maintain accountability for overall delivery of business benefits and provide ‘end-to-end’ project management?

Lloyds TSB has done much work in this area, most recently implementing a revised business change management life-cycle, integrating the project and business benefits delivery processes. Group IT recognised that in order to support the new life-cycle it would be essential that IT project managers have the skills to manage complex technical projects while at the same time fully understanding the value of the initiative to the business and how this impacts upon their project delivery.

Outcome

CITI’s new professional level project manager development programme provided the ideal solution. At this level there are now 3 pathways – technical, business and contract intensive, and in-company programmes are built from components across the groupings.

For Lloyds TSB the 5 plus 3 day programme combines generic advanced project management techniques, technology specific and business change components plus a contract management element.

Further tailoring of the course was performed by our expert case designers who analysed two of the bank’s recent major projects thereby exploiting the opportunities for lessons learned by weaving them into the learning experience.

From the start Neil Morse (the Lloyds TSB sponsor) was keen to establish practical measures of the impact of the development programme. He and his team have worked closely with the participants and they are already able to identify real results during several of their project management activities following the course. Their relationship with the business has improved and, in particular, working with the business team to focus and define their real problem is reaping rewards.