Littlewoods - developing PSO visibility tools

It took less than eighteen months for Littlewoods to demonstrate significant benefit to their organisation. The use of CITI’s approach, tools and education has proved a very real advantage to them.

Opportunity

For most organisations an accurate appreciation of the status and performance of live projects is beyond their grasp. This carries a high burden of cost. Projects which should be terminated limp on; those deviating from plan are identified late in the day, if at all, when wastage is already high and the cost of remedy is higher still.

Approach

Littlewoods were better placed than most; they had in place robust monitoring mechanisms and reports. However there was a suspicion amongst their project support team that the use of these tools was too reactive and not achieving the added value that they should. They wanted to achieve more than just reporting cost and progress to the board.

Their objective was to have current and reliable information, in order to succeed this meant that it had to give confidence through its credibility and demonstrate that projects were delivering more consistently and safely. Status should be capable of immediate and accurate interpretation and the information should be of use to the project teams as well as the sponsors. It was for these reasons that they engaged CITI.

Outcome

A combination of a consistent approach and simple but effective reporting has seen a halving of increases in cost over original estimates. Alternatively, before the changes half of their projects had a variance exceeding 50% of plan and only 3% could be expected to come within 10% of plan.

Within a year of implementing the CITI approach nearly 20% of projects came within 10% of plan and the number exceeding 50% variance was beneath 30%. The sheer financial impact of these advances is not the only advantage that Littlewoods gained; heightened confidence in the planning and execution of projects reflects right through to board level where outcomes are more predictable and decisions are therefore more focused.