How The PMO Professionals helped a programme team to improve the predictability of delivery.
The Situation
The PMO Professionals were engaged to support a multi-year, multi-site, multi-million pound, multi-project programme to refit a global HQ building while it was still in occupation.
The building was to remain occupied throughout, so the works were to take place in a series of phases.
Most of the workstream leads were operational people with a deep understanding of the business. However, they had little or no experience planning projects, and there was no schedule in place.
The Objective
Create an overall view of activity within the programme with the ability to predict delivery dates.
The Approach
Working closely with stakeholders, The PMO Professionals:
- Liaised with project managers and workstream leads to understand their plans, interdependencies and planning expertise.
- Recognised the intricate nature of the program, appreciating that it wasn’t a simple chain of projects, with B starting after A had completed.
- Strategically crafted an integrated program schedule in Microsoft® Project®, meticulously modelling the key events and dependencies and connecting early project outputs as inputs to later projects.
- Realised that as the phases would be similar and broadly sequential, there was an opportunity to apply learning to later phases.
- Ran lessons learned workshops on early phases and identified a set of standard “cookie cutter” client activities that would need to be carried out for every phase.
- Applied these to later phases as a template that could be tailored for each phase.
The Outcome
- Within a month, a summarised schedule of the programme’s projects, key dates and dependencies was in place to answer the question, “What are we delivering, with whom and by when?”.
- Within three months, a detailed schedule was in place to dynamically model project activities and dependencies, with filters to show, e.g., the next four weeks and any late activities for a given project manager or workstream lead.
- As a result, later phases were provided with much better visibility of the required activities than earlier projects and phases had enjoyed. Those later phases went much more smoothly as activities were not overlooked, and learning from earlier phases was put to use.
- These things together improved credibility and confidence with operational stakeholders from across the business, and improved customer and colleague service and satisfaction.
