Case Studies
On-site case studies
Sponsorship
We were asked by a government agency to provide basic skills training in project management for internal staff who were being appointed to project management posts alongside their existing responsibilities. We developed a programme of bespoke on-site training events to meet this need. As a result of the training, the lack of project sponsorship skills within senior management was identified as a problem area. However, senior managers were not aware that this was an issue, and did not realise that they themselves had a training need.
In order to improve the situation we devised a senior management workshop to develop the organisations approach to governing project and change initiatives. By expanding the scope of what senior managers would be working on during the workshop we increased the attendance rate and developed the willingness of the senior managers to attend the training.
Within this workshop we incorporated several sessions on the responsibilities of project sponsors and techniques for carrying out these responsibilities including checklists of questions to ask at key project milestones, what information to request when assessing project progress, and reviewing requests for change and how to share the responsibility for stakeholder engagement between the roles of sponsor and project manager.
Portfolio Planning
A large European service organisation asked us to support the development of a portfolio of projects, programmes and change initiatives that would deliver their strategic objectives.
The organisation had committed to a high growth strategy, and delivery of the new 3 year plan would require exceptional performance from every business unit, with a firm control over costs. It was clear that there would be little time or resource available for failed initiatives, so the criteria for accepting projects into the portfolio would need to be clear and unequivocal.
We held a training event to teach senior managers best practice in portfolio management from the Management of Portfolio (MoP™) approach from the Office of Government Commerce. Senior managers were asked to apply this knowledge at a series of workshops facilitated by Maven. The first workshop defined the acceptance criteria for the portfolio and subsequent workshops analysed specific areas of the business to identify potential projects, programmes and change initiatives over the next 12 months.
We collated the results of each of the workshops, built a database of all proposed initiatives, applied the acceptance criteria to this database and presented the portfolio back to senior managers for their approval. We then held a number of communication events to explain the process and the contents of the portfolio to the project and programme managers who would be managing the work.
Introduction to programme management
We were asked by the PMO Manager of an NHS Primary Care Trust (PCT) to devise a series of practical events to explain the structure and benefits of programme management to the senior management team and the practice based commissioners. The request that we received was:
“the most relevant thing would be not to overload them with terminology or jargon but that they understand the essentials, their role as Senior Managers and finally how programme management helps them and what are the most common challenges. I don't mind if they don't get a super detailed view and later on demand a follow up session, but what they practice and discuss is relevant for them.”
Programme Management is a wide ranging subject so we met with the PMO Manager to understand the critical issues, and also with several of the potential audience to understand their requirements including their responsibilities, problems and issues that they are experiencing as they become involved in programme work, and their goals and strategic objectives and how the programmes fit into this. From these meetings we identified critical success criteria that helped us deliver the most relevant events:
- The session must be practical – it must relate to their own situation and not use examples outside of the NHS
- The sessions must be no longer than 2 hours and be booked 4 weeks in advance to allow for scheduling conflicts to be resolved
- Includes interactive activities that illustrate the theory of programme management but also solve an immediate issue that the senior managers relate to and find relevant
The results of the sessions can best be summarised through the feedback of those that attended:
- Very responsive to our needs, illuminating and empowering
- Very good session that was very insightful and stimulating, lots of food for thought
- Clear, concise and jargon free delivery
- Very interesting, increased my understanding of sponsorship and the relationship to project management
Other case studies
