Digital Transformation

Background

An innovation hub had been established by the government to drive technological advances in the UK construction and infrastructure sectors. The hub brought together three of the leading organisations from the built environment as partners to collaboratively deliver four major programmes that were critical for the transformation and competitiveness of the sector. The changes were large scale and wide-ranging and within these programmes were 60 separate projects across 18 workstreams. A centralised Senior Management Team and PMO had been formed within the innovation hub to coordinate the delivery of the integrated programmes.

Challenge

The central PMO was facing significant challenges in coordinating the integration of the three partner organisations into the hub, with their own cultures and ways of working, and managing the complexity of implementing the four programmes. The administrative burden of the hub’s implementation approach was high and starting to overwhelm. Together these factors were causing the programmes delivery to slip dramatically and posed a serious risk of failure.

Our team was engaged to enable the innovation hub to get their integrated programmes back on track, transform the programme delivery implementation capability and reduce labour intensity by streamlining the programme management.

Solution

Our team conducted a detailed analysis of the innovation hub’s programme management systems, operating rhythm and decision-making processes, including assessing the true resource load across the programmes, and reported back to the client.

Issues were identified across a range of programme areas such as the lack of work plan and version control, unclear accountabilities including an inability to identify project owners and responsibilities for specific tasks, a reactive approach to PMO actions and decision-making, inefficient decision-making cycles and response times, actual project performance being masked by workload, and unstructured meetings that undermined the programme focus.

We proposed a shift in approach in the client’s programme management and implemented our bespoke change management tool into the client’s way of working accompanied by the training and coaching of more than 80 people on the system. Our change management support tool brought all elements of the change into one centralised place to provide a live and complete view of the programme. It created for the first time a single work plan encompassing the hub and all partner organisations as one delivery community and provided clear accountabilities for all programme deliverables and the ability to transparently track progress in real time. With this one agreed source of the truth, the client was able to start to regain control over their programmes.

The new operating methodology also required behaviour change within the hub and partner organisations, which they were coached in by our team. We worked with the client to demonstrate how the bespoke change management tool could make a difference to key areas of programme implementation such as strategic meetings. The one version of the truth generated by the change management tool focused conversations on agreed information, driving accurate, data-backed understanding that enabled better decisions to be made. This turned reactive into proactive programme management with forecasting, planning and control. It also accelerated decision-making cycles to prevent issues arising in advance through an ‘impacted’ and ‘escalation’ feature.

We also worked closely with the innovation hub to create a highly effective feedback loop throughout the programme implementation. This used an agile methodology to continuously enhance the change management tool system through sprints to address the client’s evolving needs and overcome any problems as they emerged. This resulted in improvements such as automated and tailored reporting, which achieved a 40% reduction in reporting time, the development of a dashboard for the SMT and PMO to drive programme performance, as well as a quality check dashboard which used a ‘comment by exception’ approach to highlight improvement focus areas to target.

Outcome

Our engagement transformed the client’s ability and capabilities to manage, implement and deliver change. Our bespoke change management support tool’s capabilities and the client’s adoption of associated working behaviours resulted in all four programmes returning to schedule and delivering their intended outcomes. Project performance significantly improved with immediate overdue items identified and actioned, while the administrative burden that was overwhelming the project was dramatically reduced, with savings made in automating the reports alone amounting to >120 people hours per month.