Opportunity

Simon Marshall, Operations Director, said: “We wanted to standardise and develop project management capability within our organisation. As a leading provider of environmental analysis we have, over the past 15 years, built a reputation for expertise and our extensive analytical capability. Now, we need to build a similar reputation for our project community, delivering those vital internal projects that are critical to our ongoing business success.”

Typically, projects within STL are in support of business improvement initiatives, aimed to develop efficiency to processes and operational mechanisms. Such projects focus on the upgrading of capital equipment, delivery of capital investments or enhancements to production processes or methods.

Approach

To achieve the challenging objectives set for 2007, STL’s Leadership Team recognised the need to provide formal project management training to managers and key personnel throughout the business, in order to develop a common language and methodology. It was clear that project management best practice needed to be embedded within the organisation to ensure efficient and timely delivery of projects.

At the same time, sponsors and business owners needed to understand how to deliver benefits realisation and maximise the value derived from the partnership of project manager and sponsor. “Engaging the sponsors had an immediate and visible impact on the business,” commented Simon. “We asked CITI to design and deliver a sponsor briefing to our senior executives that would help them ensure that areas identified as critical for project success would be addressed by their management actions.”

“The briefing explored their roles, responsibilities, appropriate attitudes and success behaviours, to effectively challenge and diagnose project performance. This gave our sponsors immediate confidence and control in their role. For the project managers, it was important that they not only understood the core principles of the project lifecycle but had a greater awareness and understanding of the commercial value of projects and the role they play in the delivery of business strategy.”

“We worked with CITI to customise a Project Practitioner course in which we integrated delivery, so that senior executives from STL actively contributed to the course through opening and closing sessions. The course also included learning activities that included standardising the project closedown and review processes and allocating responsibility for managing the realisation of benefits.”

Given the complex stakeholder scenarios within STL and the importance of managing and engaging with the projects, STL-specific issues and challenges were discussed and worked on during the course. Reference to STL governance structures and investment management processes provided further contextualisation for the course participants. A series of work-based assignments, completed between the two course modules, allowed participants to practise and apply new learning in a safe and supportive environment, and to review their learning with colleagues.

Outcome

“Partnering with CITI to improve project management has really been a good experience for us,” said Simon. “Our project community now feel confident in their approach and are quickly gaining a reputation for consistently delivering business value.”

Opportunity

Support offices — known by various names — are often seen as the Cinderella of the project management world. Sometimes they are used simply for administrative work; but a good PPSO can do a great deal more, ensuring that best practices and procedures are followed, and providing effective guidance for project managers.

A PPSO can be the place where experienced project and process experts reside, providing advice and support to all project managers, and helping to raise the game of the whole organisation. The PPSO can also set organisation-wide standards. This ensures that all projects report in a consistent format, allowing senior managers to identify the key issues, and make effective decisions on priorities, resource allocation and strategic goals.

A good PPSO can make the critical difference by providing senior management with visibility and control over their key projects and programmes. It can also act as the organisation’s long-term memory and repository of learning, and provide a link to sources of best practice knowledge and experience that keep the whole organisation up to the mark in programme and project delivery.

Approach

CITI and Atkins are working together to professionalise the PPSO, liaising with leading professional bodies to provide career paths that will establish the PPSO — just as much as project management itself — as a career with recognised standards of excellence, and not just a short-term job. This opportunity is available to any organisation that is truly serious about its project and programme capability.

Outcome

First fruit of this alliance is the recently announced five-year contract to provide a Programme and Project Support Office (PPSO) for Government Communication Headquarters (GCHQ). The service will combine Atkins’ experience in running project support services with CITI’s state-of-the-art expertise in programme and project management.