Value realised

Clarity and consistency of delivery approach coupled to the ability to appropriately ‘tailor’ individual project’s assurance regimes at London Heathrow lead to significant delivery cost reduction whilst at the same time being coupled to increased safety of their investment cases throughout their projects’ lifecycles. These rewards arose from the controlled development and implementation of their Capital Delivery Divisions project lifecycle.

Mat Palmer a senior programme director at London Heathrow (LHR), who commissioned the piece of work, recognises CITI’s contribution “…the subject matter expertise, clarity of thinking and passionate facilitation provided by CITI all made huge contributions to the overall effectiveness of this initiative.”

Engagement focus

The situation that LHR faced was confusing. A legacy of numerous methodologies and independent processes, which were still extant and to some degree abided by, had led to the organisation attempting to introduce a ‘heavy weight’ consultancy-led homogenous framework. This failed to gain traction amongst the user community, probably because it was developed externally, with little or no involvement amongst the users and without any operational detail or considerations factored into the approach. A further contributory factor being that due to the segregated lifecycle in Capital Delivery projects there is invariably a hand-over from pre-feasibility, optioneering and scheme development to delivery; this, unsurprisingly, requires the careful management of different stakeholders.

Learning from the organisation’s costly mistake Matt decided to run a ‘Blitz’ week; during this he would corral the primary opinion shapers in each of the business units, involved across the entire product lifecycle, to resolve an appropriate overall project lifecycle at an architectural level. This would then allow the development of the detailed supporting sub-processes whilst, crucially, maintaining the buy-in and commitment of the disparate divisions. To flatter this ambition Matt was keen to ensure that the exercise of developing this process should be seen as organisational and not partisan to the Capital Delivery division – he therefore needed the work to be mediated by an expert third party.

Looking for an experienced facilitator, who could manage powerful stakeholders from different parts of the business whilst, at the same time, putting an imprimatur of expertise in assurance and change -lifecycle development on the exercise, led to the engagement of CITI.

Approach to solution

The solution was developed over a two stage process. The first stage was the ‘Blitz’ week itself. During this two CITI consultants acted as facilitators, scribes and subject matter experts on lifecycle development and application. A seven stage lifecycle with clearly differentiated gates was collaboratively developed against an input/output model. This allowed a powerful differentiation of entry from exit gates that facilitated modifications to the governance structure to give clarity over who would be making which decisions and on what basis at different points in the process.

On a daily basis the output and conclusions of the workshops were reviewed by the senior management team of LHR to ensure consistency, buy-in and alignment. By the Friday afternoon an organisationally agreed seven-stage architectural model had been developed along with a listing of the key inputs and outputs (mainly authorisation and control documentation – e.g. updated business cases) at each of the stage gates. The week concluded with a planning session to enable stage two to proceed.

Stage two was about the development and formalisation of the detailed sub-processes of the lifecycle that would allow the architectural model to function efficiently and with sufficient flexibility to be tailored to different initiatives (part of an effective assurance management process being about ensuring the assurance is commensurate with the complexity, risk and cost of failure of any given initiative). This was achieved with CITIs support in a mixed consulting/executive engagement. An example of this would have been the application of standard LHR levels of authority to different levels of complexity (as determined by CITI’s Project Complexity Analysis Tool [PCAT]) to establish the appropriate level of control and therefore stage gate requirements for any given initiative.

Working alongside the small internal team within Capital Delivery, who maintained vigorously active links with all parties involved in the ‘Blitz’ week, on a model that tapered down from a day or two a week to ad-hoc individual ‘draw-down’, CITI was able to maintain a degree of expertise, explanation and continuity that made the journey to the official launch and adoption of the new lifecycle as efficient as possible.

Lessons learned

Being able to apply simple, principle-based approaches during a week-long facilitated workshop, particularly with voluble and opinionated participants, delivers real clarity to all parties. These simple approaches however have to be underpinned by a profound understanding of the ways in which assurance can add value and what constitutes an appropriate level of assurance for any given initiative. Unless this can be achieved, the ability to deliver the optimum value through tailoring assurance will be lost.

Appropriate stakeholder engagement is invariably helpful in engineering successful change. Not only achieving early, high-energy, commitment but then maintaining an active dialogue during the ‘long-haul’ detailed development. The management of both of these to gain buy-in to, and acceptance of, the final outputs was one of the most significant factors in driving Matt’s success.

Models / tools used

The ‘Blitz’ week depended heavily on CITI’s use of its facilitative and educational skills alongside the application of the IDEF0 process model to generate an input/output view of the lifecycle. Lifecycle differentiation techniques were also deployed to remove the latent ambiguity, between project and product development lifecycles, that permeates many capital delivery organisations.

Tailoring of subsequent assurance and governance processes, arising from the developed lifecycle, was assisted by the application of PCAT which was suitably moderated for the particular complexities that LHR has to frequently deal with.

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Value realised

The company met its strategic vision of focusing manufacturing activities that provide sustainable employment in the UK. It also delivered the anticipated financial benefits of £148m cost avoided through the closure of sites, and a further £30m from the transfer of business activity from closed sites to retained sites.

As Bob Warner, CEO of Remploy, commented: “Remploy now has a really credible project and programme management capability, which is working to the highest professional standards. We now have what we need to meet the new challenges the company faces in its modernisation programme, including the building and development of successful businesses following the restructuring”.

Engagement focus

Remploy was set the challenge of modernising its business. The strategy required the closure of a significant number of factories – something that Remploy had never done before.

Previous attempts to restructure the business had not been successful. Important factors that had to be addressed were objections, on both moral and political grounds, from key stakeholders. To succeed the programme had to engage with these groups and to clearly demonstrate how the changes would culminate in a better and sustainable future. This meant a lot of planning, a lot of communications and participation in the planning, and a strong discipline within the projects to deliver what they promised.

Approach to solution

The scale and complexity of the change meant that using a project portfolio approach would not work. Project disciplines were needed to deliver specific results (e.g. the closure, merger and transfer of particular factories). But to deliver the benefits, to avoid unacceptable dis-benefits and to ensure groups were not inadvertently disadvantaged, required flexible approaches. The sequence of events were subject to complex negotiations, with the boundaries changing quite rapidly – with core elements of the scope, such as how many sites would be closed, how many employees would accept each of the different options available to them, and what level of funding would be necessary remaining ambiguous long after the start of the initiative.

For all these reasons, CITI chose a programme approach. This gave Remploy the ability to manage the overall complexity at programme level, including implementing changes resulting from negotiations or unexpected events, while maintaining absolute clarity about what each individual project was required to do, and managing the interdependencies at programme level.

Lessons learned

Ambiguity is sometimes unavoidable, and attempting to eliminate it too early leads to failure, with stakeholders feeling dissatisfied and their agendas ignored. Programmes, despite the significant difficulties associated with their management, are often the only management vehicle sophisticated enough to address this – as projects uniformly fail in the presence of unresolved vagueness.

Models / tools used

Benefit – impact – product modelling
Tranche construction
Programme management toolkit

Value proposition

You can read more about the strategies used during this engagement here:

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Value realised

Ensuring future income streams whilst, at the same time, exerting greater control on an increasingly safe investment portfolio were amongst the bigger wins that London Heathrow (LHR) were able to achieve through the deployment of CITI support in driving up business case management capability.
Max Vialou-Clark, a senior manager of LHR retail assets, commented that: “The expertise and modelling tools that CITI brought to bear saw a quantum leap in the quality and, consequently, usefulness of business cases within our retail investment environment”.

Engagement focus

Earlier work, principally in the Capital Delivery division, on improving lifecycle and assurance management had high-lighted the opportunity for focus on business cases as a potential area for improvement. Simultaneously the arrival of Max saw the instigation of a review of the existing business cases in the retail area of LHR. The conclusion of this review was that there was insufficient consistency or confidence in the business cases; they appeared to be created and treated more as an initial investment hurdle, to be cleared, than a vehicle for shepherding each investment successfully through and beyond its delivery lifecycle. Max needed to be able to sort out the investment portfolio on a ‘level playing field’ and therefore needed reliability and consistency in each investment’s business case to enable comparability.
The initial focus of the engagement was therefore to develop a standard understanding of what the use and application of a business case was along with the basic capability to develop compelling business cases. The former ambition was aimed principally at developing the sponsoring community and the latter at delivery personnel who were the primary authors of business cases.

Both were to be taught through workshops and practical application. Heavy focus was placed on the primacy of desireability over doability (that is to say the establishment of benefits should precede the determination of cost and risk) and the reinforcement of this learning by creating and reviewing business cases against a new and consistent model. Sponsors were faced with their accountability for successful delivery of the business case whilst the delivery community were exposed to the finer aspects of assessing the reality of the benefits position and creating increasingly reliable perspectives on the cost and risk components of the business case.

Simultaneously to the development piece gaining traction, not only within retail but also elsewhere within the organisation, the pressure was also increasing on LHR, as a whole, to put a consistent and well balanced business-level business case to the Civil Aviation Authority (the arbiters of LHRs regulatory income) for the next five year planning horizon. At this point the focus of the engagement shifted from developing capability to reviewing and validating the component business cases that would contribute to securing LHR’s future income streams.

Approach to solution

Two strands were therefore pursued in parallel.
The first and most labour intensive strand was subjecting the community (principally of project managers and business analysts) of business case authors to focused two-day workshops. Day one hinged on the examination of benefits and their associated impacts whilst day two focused on the scrutiny of the cost and risk components of the business case. The outcomes sought from this strand were twofold. Firstly achieving a consistency in outlook and authorship of a business cases; such that the language (categories of benefits, appropriate key performance indicators e.t.c.), syntax and presentation. The second outcome sought was an attitude that business cases were not ‘one-off’ investment hurdle devices but ‘living’ documents that could and should evolve across the lifecycle of the investment and should therefore inform most aspects of governance decision making.

The second strand of the solution was the instigation of a series of sponsor briefings to ensure that sponsors were demanding and scrutinising the appropriate emphasis in their business cases such that there decision making and focus was improved.

Ultimately the upshot of this two strand approach was to drive up quality, consistency and application of business cases across Heathrow to the extent that a solid, internally consistent representation could be made to the CAA for future funding. With subsequent clarification of the CAA constraints the business cases could be used to adjust the workload to leave LHR with the optimum investment portfolio.

Lessons learned

The development of authorship capability in isolation of sponsor awareness of the right content and proper purpose of the business case, from their perspective, is not effective; the two elements conducted in parallel maximises the value of the investment.

Having a sound and consistent set of business cases is a pre-requisite for appropriate portfolio balancing and decision making. Accidental as an outcome in LHR’s case, it turned out to be a huge serendipity, in light of the emerging constraints from the CAA, when it came to re-jigging the optimum portfolio for BAA.

Models / tools used

CITI’s approach of giving primacy to benefits, over cost and risk, in the development sequence of a sound business case was the essential model in developing both halves of the capability. Sponsors from a benefits and strategic value perspective and authors from, a benefit, impacts, product mapping perspective balanced against the costs and risks of delivery. The mission model tool was the main instrument for understanding, discussing and expressing this balance.

Value proposition

You can read more about the strategies used during this engagement here:

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