Ensuring the portfolio management and change function supports a large transformation

Our customer is a leading UK-based research charity, and the largest fundraiser.

It is an organisation with a very broad scope. This includes a retail arm, as well as policy and information activities that routinely influence government, health services and population behaviours.

They also run massive fundraising operations and organise large-scale events. In addition, they carry out core purpose work encompassing everything from the funding and co-ordination of cutting edge medical, biological and technical science, development and clinical trials of drugs and therapeutics, and commercial development of a portfolio of valuable IP.

Their vision is to bring forward the day when all cancers are cured. Their ambition is for a world where people can all live longer, better lives, free from the fear of cancer.

The national oncology-focused non-profit is largely a federated business that is trying to establish structure, order and consistency across the organisation whilst at the same time deliver its most ambitious transformation programme that is consuming the majority of IT and technical staff as well as many SMEs from across the business.

The main challenges they were facing included:

Embedding the Transformation Programme Office across the wider Organisation

• To improve the ability to deliver change, building on the work that had been done following the last three-year planning (3YP) cycle and the establishment of the organisation’s TMO to monitor, track and support transformational initiatives
• To improve their ability to deliver change and close the gap around enterprise-level portfolio management
• To establish the TMO as the go-to transformation expertise in the organisation and align future transformation activities into a consolidated portfolio
• To support and be ready for the 3YP planning cycle by ensuring a consistent set of standards, templates and processes were in place to drive the planning process.

Supporting the Engage Transformation Programme (ETP)

Firstly to address a couple of key shortcomings identified via an external assurance audit. This included:

• Understanding key critical milestones and dependencies across the programmes core workstreams and producing a programme level critical path roadmap
• Establishing a demand capacity process that easily enabled the programme to understand its resourcing gaps and challenges

Secondly to run and manage the Programme Management Office addressing the following:

• Day to Day running of the PMO
• Governance processes and reporting, including confidence rating
• Manage and run key steering committees and sponsor meetings
• Programme level risk and issue reviews
• Financial reporting, especially approach to demand and capacity planning
• Benefits management approach and reporting
• Workstream and project initiation process

The key business risk is the success of the ETP programme, specifically the Relationship Management workstream which was delivering a new platform using Salesforce to enable migration of core data from an aging and unreliable Siebel platform before there was a major failure of this system.

Without successful delivery of ETP the organisation would not be able to continue with, and to improve its fundraising activities via consistent supporter data, marketing campaigns, supporter journey, third party marketing support, reporting and analytics.

Our customer decided to go to tender to find a partner to address the above challenges, recognising that they did not have the skill or ability to do this with internal resource.

For ETP the key challenges were to quickly:

• Set up and deliver a detailed dependencies and plan for an ETP roadmap identifying the critical path and key decisions linked to dependencies. To deliver the processes for on-going review and update
• Review governance to recommend and implement changes that will support ongoing dependency and demand (capacity) management
• Review and redefine a standard set of reports and associated tools, processes and timelines across delivery, change, resource demand, financials/FTE for ETP.

For the TMO work the key challenges were to:

• Gather and understand the wider transformation initiatives across the whole business
• Review current toolkit, processes, templates, reporting and dashboards
• Co-design the future TMO model, and what services and functions the TMO would provide
• Support the initiation and early stages of the next 3YP planning cycle
• Support from the TMO Executive and required governance and reporting cycles across the broader organisational reporting.

Additionally, resources are a major challenge across the ETP programme with workstreams being initiated only to find the internal resources (both Technical and business SMEs) are not available to support, delays processing RFPs and speed of onboarding of new suppliers.

The other key challenge for ETP was the focus on migration to Salesforce, often at the expense of the rest of the business because of the critical state of Siebel. This approach consumed key resources as mentioned above, however Salesforce alone will not provide the required solution. It is the functionality around the Personalisation workstream which will drive the real business benefit. Personalisation will enable personalised journeys for supporters and allow marketing campaigns to be much more focused and targeted than is currently possible, as well as reducing internal advertising spend, cost savings due to automation.

The TMO work was challenged by the definition and agreement of what did our customer want from a TMO, how could it be ‘sold’, and how will it deliver organisation wide benefit. Part of the initial challenge was gaining clarity on envisaged the future TMO model, which we worked with the team to develop.

Finally, the limited hand-over from the existing ETP PMO team (due to earlier than expected exits of the team), created challenges in maintaining effective PMO support to ETP in the early days. In order to mitigate, we diverted more effort to this stay on top of the challenges and issues. This additional effort was recognised by the customer who later praised our efforts and the improvements we implemented during this process.

From an ETP perspective

We addressed the shortcoming of the external assurance report by:

• Establishing a programme level set of dependencies and supporting roadmap plan. Identifying the critical milestones and decision points and thus the critical path. Endorsement of plan with the ETP Steering Committee and establishing an enduring process for maintaining the roadmap
• Creating a resourcing capacity demand forecast and supporting process embedded into the monthly reporting cycle and ETP Steering committee
• Processes formally reviewed and accepted by the external assurance team.

ETP Governance Improvements include:

• Improvements to ETP Steerco pack, including confidence rating
• New Risk and Issue Management process, embedded into BAU with sessions at Delivery Huddle and Sponsors meetings
• Project One best practice benefits management process
• Restructured PID document in use
• PMO Diary schedule

From a CRUK TMO perspective

Improvements to CRUK 3YP planning cycle

• Dependency, capacity and roadmap alignment of outputs to 3YP and 1YP
• Established 3YP Working Group
• Developed a specific framework
• Identification & proposal of improvements to planning
• Created alignment with Strategy team
• Developed a new Change Initiative format specifically focusing on a single ask to planning leads covering a standard Change Initiative data set, linked process with budget setting.

• Completed maturity assessment to cover both Portfolio Management Capability and Delivery Management, Identifying significant gaps and shortcomings
• Review of reporting (Change Initiative, Portfolio and Dashboards) and recommendations for the As-Is provided
• Future PMO design provided including roles (team structure, role descriptions for the EPMO), scope (capabilities of Portfolio Office & EPMO ownership of) and detailed capability designs
• For PMO implementation defined tools, reporting and processes across all Portfolio Capabilities. Improvements to PID and Risks and Issues reporting. Shared further best practices across Benefits Management, Stage Gate Management, Planning & Milestones & Confidence Levels.

The impact of the above is already yielding benefits to the improved management and reporting of the ETP programme, with greater clarity, focus and accuracy.

The TMO work has set the client up for success as it looks to the management of the wider change portfolio and the consistency of driving that off the back of the 3YP planning exercise.

Project One value Add:

Why they needed to use us and the value we bring

• Experienced change and programme management expertise
• Focus on and address the key challenges faced
• Effective management of the ETP PMO
• Process improvements for PIDs, Resource Capacity Demand management, Critical path identification and analysis
• Aligning TMO and 3YP planning activities
• Establishing a robust plan and joined-up approach to 3YP activity.

What makes us different to our competitors

• Seasoned expertise in supporting large scale transformation and change programme and PMO functions.
• Practical solutions, and templates that were easy to land with the business
• Structure and approach to a somewhat dysfunctional organisation.

Do you need change expertise?

We helped and supported a charity to ensure that it had all the right enterprise PMO processes, and governance in place and is operating effectively to support and drive their number one change and transformation programme. At the same time, we drove coordination and consistency through their three-year planning process, corralling the organisation to work together to a single standard so that for the first time there is a consistent approach to change management and planning for all the change initiatives in the organisation, via the establishment of the 3YP working group.