The Challenge
Our client was in need of standards to make Project Managers more efficient at initiating and executing projects. Their projects were losing time and money due to a lack of familiarity with internal processes and inconsistent rigour being applied to control projects. Management also wanted better visibility of the progress of projects and the issues being encountered.
The standards had to support projects that varied widely in duration and complexity. They had to be adopted by different areas each with their own focus and needed to adhere to many bank wide internal procedures mandated by different areas. Importantly, the standards had to speed up rather than slow down project delivery, because time to market was a key business driver.
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How EQuest Consulting Met the Challenge
EQuest Consulting designed the standards in close consultation with the client’s management and Project Managers. The standards included project initiation guidelines, business case preparation, project planning guidelines, schedule creation and tracking, risk and issue management and project reporting content and process.
To facilitate the use of the standards we designed a tool for deployment on the Bank’s intranet. The tool was designed to be a workbench for Project Managers with which to manage their projects. We ran a trial with a subset of the Project Managers who used the tool to apply the standards to their current projects. This ensured that requirements had been met for applicability, flexibility and fit to the environment and that concerns were addressed prior to rolling out the tool across the Division.
Since change management is key to any maturity improvement initiative, we ran a comprehensive mentoring program to ensure that all Project Managers understood and accepted the standards and the tool. This served well to mature the project management culture.
EQuest Consulting then helped to set up a Project Office to support the Project Managers going forward. We defined the role of the Project Office in consultation with management and familiarised its new manager and staff, getting them up and running and effective in a short time frame.
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The Benefits
A clear improvement in the standard of project management. This included faster, more efficient project initiation and tighter control of project execution, which will lead to cost savings through reduced project failure rates and speedier delivery. Management and stakeholders benefited from much improved, high quality, consistent project status reporting information. The success of the exercise was evident when the tool was subsequently rolled out to additional areas of the Bank after a study concluded that it was the most effective project management tool in use in the Bank.
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