1. Prioritising and planning the work - a specialist insurance company
The new head of business transformation quickly recognised that little information about
over 80 IT systems and process improvement projects was available. Most of them didn’t
have a business case or any benefits defined; projects had been authorised on the basis of
the seniority of the person requesting them and ‘who shouts the loudest’ rather than
against strategic objectives or their contribution to the project portfolio. Many individuals
were assigned to multiple projects, up to eight to ten each at any one time; in exceptional
cases key individuals were expected to manage 17 projects each.
Maven identified that the project management, programme management and portfolio
management maturity level for the organisation, was between zero and one. We then
created a prioritised project portfolio of all initiatives running and known about but not yet
started, and started to identify the resource gaps for getting all of the work completed. We
then put in place a rigorous governance framework for overall control of all projects and
change initiatives.
Now everyone involved in projects adopts this new governance framework. There were
teething problems as individuals found that they had to work to a framework that suited the
needs of the many instead of just their own needs but over the course of a few months this
was embedded. Senior management now have a comprehensive view of all initiatives and
their authorisation of new initiatives is based on agreed and known business criteria –
financial, operational, competitive, regulatory and societal. This has reduced the number of
‘false starts’ where projects were started but then abandoned from 1 in 4 initiatives to less
than 3 initiatives in the last year in total.
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