Projects – Project Management
If your project doesn't work, look for the part you didn't think was important
- Arthur Bloch
We can help improve the effectiveness of your projects in four ways:
- as Project Manager
- through input into Project Board;
- by offering Project Assurance; and
- through Post-implementation Reviews.
We have experienced project managers who can take over the management of projects for our clients. We can work within any project management discipline that your organisation uses, or generically apply Prince 2. This solution often suits smaller organisations without an internal project management resource or to manage large multi-disciplinary projects.
We can also act as coach to less experienced project managers.
In many cases Project Boards value independent advice from highly experienced practitioners. For instance, when outsourcing administration it can be helpful to trustees to appoint an independent expert to give them advice rather than rely exclusively on the advice of the new supplier (which could be biased towards the supplier’s preferred way of working).
Project AssuranceProject assurance may be as formal or informal as you need. Frequently we are asked to take a quick look and comment on a project plan to identify any major problems. For high impact projects, we prefer to formally review the project plan and other documents to be able to offer an opinion on how robust the planning process has been – eg have resource needs been correctly identified, all dependencies mapped, risks assessed etc? By identifying problems before the project proceeds, the risk of delays and budget increases are largely mitigated.
Post-implementation ReviewsThere is often little time to stand-aside during a project to consider general lessons which can be learned. There is also benefit in checking whether the original objectives have been met. For instance, after installing a new pension system we can undertake a review to confirm that the functionality promised by the supplier has in fact been delivered.
