Delivering a full business transformation programme recovery

Our customer is a UK-based weight management organisation focused on helping individuals achieve sustainable weight loss through its flexible eating plan, supportive community, and lifestyle guidance. Weekly group sessions, led by trained consultants, provide education, encouragement, and accountability, while the core programme promotes gradual increases in physical activity. With both in-person and online membership options, they foster a positive and inclusive environment for building healthier habits and achieving long-term success.

While they have kept pace with changes in society and how they are able to deliver their programmes, for example pivoting to more of an online digital presence during the pandemic, the technology stack has become outdated and a blocker to addressing rapidly new strategic objectives.

In 2022, the peer-led healthy lifestyle company embarked on a business-wide Change and Transformation programme, aiming at enabling new strategic orientations through a significant system refresh, as well as processes and organisation redefinition.

The programme had started to be viewed as a technology upgrade rather than an enabling business transformation to drive customer experience, sales and employee engagement.

The transformation support engaged at both a programme and SI level, but hadn’t landed as effectively as planned nor brought the rigour and focus required to lead. The leadership of the business needed to be re-engaged and reinvigorated to ensure everyone was on the same page, bought into the vision and was supportive of the business benefits being sought.

The Programme was “paused” to ensure it could be course corrected and reset as a business transformation programme.

Within seven months, a team of two Project One consultants reignited the Programme through a series of business transformation activities. The team:

• Performed an initial assessment of the situation and produced an initial diagnosis identifying the key issues and remediations
• Engaged with all Executive Directors to ensure buy-in
• Set out and implemented a Programme organisational structure involving all five Executive Directors as sponsors of key areas
• Engaged key internal stakeholders to align expectations
• Defined and implemented a governance framework, including a Programme Steering Board and a Business Design Authority to ensure key decisions are taken in a timely manner
• Identified wider programme PMO requirements, resource needs and dependencies
• Defined and got approval on an initial high-level scope and phasing
• Supported the definition of a Statement of Work with the System Integrator to initiate an Analysis and Design phase on a Time and Material basis to build certainty on the Programme scope and phasing
• Supervised the Analysis and Design phase to successful conclusion to ensure a smooth transition to internal Programme management resources for the build phase.

The primary outcome was the customer’s empowerment and renewed confidence to regain control of the Programme. This revitalisation not only restored momentum but also re-established trust and assurance with the Board and throughout the organisation.

The Analysis and Design phase effectively achieved its objectives by clarifying the scope of the initial Programme phase, thereby laying a solid foundation for the subsequent Build phase.

Furthermore, durable and robust Programme management processes were successfully established, ensuring long-term effectiveness and stability.

You can learn more about how the Project One PMO experts worked to ensure they also had the right governance and controls, supported by an effective PMO which is critical to successful transformation delivery and an efficient change portfolio.

Project One value Add:

• Our customer had no prior experience of implementing large scale IT change
• They did not understand how to frame the IT changes within a genuine business change programme
• No prior experience of working with a systems integrator, and did not know how to manage an SI
• Internal IT capability was focused on niche areas of compute and application development
• They had some prior knowledge of Salesforce based on a prior limited implementation, but lacked the skills necessary to evolve this into a business wide capability
• External contract resource had been used, though this had not been as productive has had been hoped.

What makes Project One different:

• Project One was able to rapidly assimilate the culture and organisational characteristics
• This allowed Project One resource to gain the trust of senior management
• This fostered an openness and willingness to engage more effectively and to enact meaningful changes to the business change approach.