Opportunity

This UK financial services subsidiary of a US conglomerate had grown rapidly through acquisition in a number of countries across Europe. However, costs were beginning to outpace revenues, with the result that the US parent instructed the UK subsidiary to develop and implement a plan to restore margins to 12% from their current position of 5%, or come up with a plan to close the business.

Any recovery plan had to be implemented within 12 months and would be funded by the US parent to the tune of $40m, only on the basis that the plan was felt to be robust by the US parent and that 50% of the savings could be realised within 6 months of the plan being approved.

Approach

Having worked with a number of executives of the organisation in the past, CITI were asked to support the management of this international cost reduction programme. Within the first week, the date for presenting the recovery plan was brought forward, leaving just 3 weeks to complete the planning for the programme across 6 countries.

The original team of 2 CITI consultants was doubled, with additional part time support from CITI headquarters. Having had experience of developing complex plans in a short timeframe, CITI employed proprietary planning techniques to develop a plan that would (a) stop the run on costs in the short term and (b) permanently revamp the processes to maintain the costs at the new level.

The client agreed to appoint an in-house programme management team for this cost reduction programme that would be supported by (1) a senior CITI programme manager with experience of large scale international programmes; (2) a senior CITI project manager who was assigned to ‘force the pace’ across the 6 countries, and (3) an experienced programme management officer who used CITI’s monitoring and control tools to track programme costs and benefits.

Working to highly compressed timeframes requires more sophisticated management and monitoring practices than usual. Supplying accurate and up to date information on costs and benefits on a weekly basis across 6 countries presents its own challenges, and yet without close monitoring and control, programmes such as these can rapidly spiral into inaction. The problem itself was not complex, but the programme’s environment and need for speed made the management of it requiring the expertise CITI brought to it.

Outcome

The programme successfully completed, delivering the agreed benefits in line with the profile in terms of value and timing, i.e. in advance of the next financial year. There was a budget variance, but it was agreed in advance with the US parent. The UK CEO wrote to the parent organisation saying that, “Without the discipline and control brought in by CITI, I am convinced that the goals would not have been reached.” When the planning had been initiated, CITI, using its own tools, implemented the monitoring programme in respect of costs and benefits.

Approach

The first step for one of the PM Competency Heads, Charles Stevens, was to understand the development needs of the community. This was done using CITI’s unique project manager profiling tool. Through a profile of the project managers’ competence, attitude and behaviours, skills and experience we were able to provide the information needed to advise Charles and other senior managers of the key development areas.

The major development areas turned out to be; stakeholder management, benefits management, quality and risk management. CITI created bespoke, highly focused, master classes to introduce practical techniques to the whole community and through this a consistent message was being developed. The PM community has also delivered a number of initiatives through its PM Focus Groups. These included an active mentoring programme, regular PM forums for encouraging networking and guest speakers.

The further step, which Charles felt was critical to the IT project managers’ sense of professionalism, was to gain accreditation. This was kicked off by putting 20 individuals through the Association for Project Management’s APMP accreditation on a pilot basis.

CITI provided its distance learning programme APMP Pathway, which was supported by a CITI mentor. This gave the project managers a very flexible study programme so they could meet their project deadlines while preparing for their exams.

Outcome

The group had an astounding 95% pass rate – a real achievement and a reflection of the commitment from the PruTech’s project managers.

The PruTech management team and CITI are continuing to develop the capability of the project management community; further groups of APMP candidates are going through their accreditation as well as a number of master classes have been scheduled every year. Charles Stevens summarises: “I can now say that we have a PM community which has a greater level of capability as well as a strong sense of identity which encourages support within its community which was recently evidenced in Prudential’s/ PruTech’s attainment of CMMI level 2.”

Forward thinking companies, such as Aviva plc, understand that this increased level of man-machine integration has to take full account of the business, technical and people aspects of doing business both electronically and physically. Norwich Union, part of the Aviva Group, recognised the need to forge a professional community of enterprise analysts and designers capable of developing and deploying such an approach.

Opportunity

The community is tasked with seamlessly translating strategic, ‘big picture’ thinking into intermediate and detailed designs capable of operational implementation. They need to effectively integrate the technical, business and organisational elements and combine them with flexibility and responsiveness to deliver real benefits into the business. CITI has been working closely with Norwich Union to develop its professional community of analysts and designers.

We were able to exploit our extensive research into how to profile professional communities of programme and project managers with its mix of technical specialists and managers and combine it with work we have done in the field of ‘enterprise blueprinting’. Norwich Union wanted a framework that it could use to define the roles and how they relate to one another.

Analysis and experience led to the identification of 10 distinct combinations of skills and knowledge and that led to the specification of 10 generic roles. It was found possible and helpful to distinguish between business and technical domain experts, as well as ‘hybrids’. In each domain there were analysts, integrators and architects and for each of these it was useful to distinguish three levels of practitioner competence – developing, established and advanced. This gave 9 of the roles: business architect, through to technical analyst. In addition it was found necessary to identify a role called technical specialist – those individuals that know a considerable amount about a specific subject – but not necessarily being an analyst!

Approach

Members of the community were then profiled using a tailor-made web-based questionnaire and face-to-face interviews according to three sets of criteria: mindset and approach, core knowledge, and enabling skills. Their responses were compared against an indicative norm, the CITI high performance group norm data set, in order to benchmark candidates against a common standard.

The feedback was provided to each candidate, giving specific comparisons and advice on personal development. It was also aggregated into a set of ‘population’ reports to senior management. These described the distribution of capability of the community, comparisons of actual to target distributions, and a development framework for building on the profiling work.

Outcome

Norwich Union is using the results of this analysis to develop its community and to achieve the appropriate mix of roles and capabilities needed to meet its future enterprise blueprinting needs. They will use the profiles to support the personal development plans of analysts and designers and to match individuals, roles and skills to development programmes and projects.

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.

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.”

Opportunity

Through the merger of The Co-operative Financial Services and Britannia Building Society – two values-driven, customer-owned businesses – the UK gained a diversified ‘super’ mutual, uniquely positioned to offer a member-owned, customer-led and ethically guided alternative to the shareholder or government-owned financial services model.

With a joint holding of £70 billion of assets, nine million customers, 12,000 employees, 300 branches and 20 corporate banking centres, Co-operative Financial Services is a major player, and the Board and the new leadership team have wasted no time in creating a shared corporate vision and set of values, putting an integrated senior management structure in place to reflect this.

Mergers cause enormous organisational change, and that means projects, lots of them. With the organisation embarking on a 3-year transformational change journey the Co-operative Financial Services Functional Leader, Delivery and Portfolio Management, Steve Hall knew that successful project delivery depended on highly capable project managers working in a close and constructive partnership with knowledgeable project sponsors. He called upon the expertise of CITI to help make this happen.

Approach

“With a large portfolio of projects ahead of us”, commented Steve, “we wanted to ensure our leadership team were supported and enabled to take on their change leadership role and deliver benefits on behalf of our customers.” “What I wanted, said Steve, “ was a series of short but engaging briefing sessions, delivered by recognised experts, to allow sponsors to understand their roles, responsibilities and successful behaviours, to effectively challenge and diagnose project performance, support risk management and manage issues and understand how to get the best from their project managers.”

Perhaps more than in any other senior management role, the skills, behaviours and attitudes required to successfully sponsor projects, knowing when and how to challenge, when to be supportive, when to become directive, is essential. Basing decisions on benefit-risk analyses that themselves are derived from project monitoring reports is not a skill many business managers have to acquire – unless they are sponsors of projects. Through introducing best practice approaches to sponsorship, and by providing evidence and insights as to what works and what doesn’t, CITI has, in the words of Steve, “given our sponsors immediate confidence and control in their role.” Throughout Q1&2 of 2010 CITI delivered a series of sponsor briefings to the executive board, business leaders and functional leaders who are directing the transformational change programme.

Outcome

The Co-operative Financial Services has continued to flourish, delivering impressive financial results for 2009 despite the recession, creating both an ethically distinctive, but highly competitive force in the financial services sector.

Jon Marchant, Business Leader, Change Management remarks, “Without the right leaders, managers and staff to drive change, and to deliver the business benefits, the expected synergies from the merged businesses will be lost. The open-mindedness and enthusiasm shown by all is undoubtedly a core strength of our culture, invaluable in the development of our change management capability.”

Steve Hall concludes, “We have seen substantial changes to the behaviour and approaches of our senior change leaders within days of attending the briefings. There is business ownership of benefits and business cases and clarity on roles and responsibilities. We already see a renewed focus on benefits delivery and partnership working which is essential to achieving our ambitious delivery goals”.

“The discussions around effective sponsorship have led us to review the allocation of the right sponsor for the right project and thus enhanced the effectiveness of our project governance. We are also beginning to see sponsors challenging current approaches and making valuable contributions to the ongoing revision of methods and practices” adds Jon Marchant, Business Leader, Change Management.

They are a leading provider of risk, savings and investment management products in the UK, with nearly seven million customers worldwide. In response to a rapidly changing business environment in their Individual Protection business, they needed to improve their capability to deliver change. We were asked to outline an approach to assess their current change capability, benchmark this against similar organisations, and design a targeted development programme that didn’t impact current priorities of the business.

Approach

“The classic training model, taking individuals out of the business to sit in a classroom for a week at a time, was not going to work for us” says Jane Logie, Strategy & Development Director, “but at the same time, we knew we needed to raise our game in managing change”. This is a current business issue for many of our clients – the need to develop capability, without the capacity to take large numbers of the change community ‘off-line’ to attend training courses.

“CITI were a good choice for us” continues Jane, “having worked with them before, we knew they were able to deliver high quality support coupled with leading edge advice and people. The main attraction of their approach has been the quality of the benchmark data used in assessing our current capability – allowing for extremely targeted development, and the way in which the development has been delivered in-line with business pressures.”

The key to success was indeed the way in which the development programme was designed and delivered specifically to suit L&G’s environment. Once the profiling element was completed – evidencing strengths and areas for development – project managers were immersed in short, best practice workshops with CITI experts. Delivered over a period of months, these workshops targeted the areas identified for development. After each workshop, individuals were given the opportunity to apply the best practice in their live project environment through supported work-based assignments. A hugely successful approach, it effectively accelerated the learning by embedding it with delivery. At the same time, it did not increase the risk to any project because these new ways of working were supported with CITI coaching.

Outcome

Reflecting on the engagement to date, Jane says “this approach was far more useful than a week in a classroom. It gave our project managers the opportunity to experience best practice in action, and didn’t distract them from our on-going business and change agenda”. “And I have to say, your people are brilliant”, finished Jane.

Nick Dobson, our Lead Tutor for the programme says ”this has been a very rewarding and interesting engagement with L&G, together we were able to explore new ways of meeting today’s challenges and were hugely successful in our pursuit”. The unique approach is being successfully implemented in other parts of the business and we continue to work with Jane’s area to meet a challenging business environment.