Delivering Program Management Improvement

Farnborough Projects are an Accredited Consultancy of the Program Management Group. One of the offerings is:

Delivering Program Management Improvement
Program Management Group plc (PMG ’s) experience in helping organisations in both the public and commercial sectors and in a number of parts of the world has lead us to an approach that is based on best practice but tailored to each organisation’s specific needs.

We believe that attempting to deliver a blanket improvement in program management maturity and agility is inadequate. The reason for this belief is that all organisations have a unique mixture of requirements, strengths and weaknesses.

Some organisations have a clearly established need to improve in specific areas of program management; others have a general requirement to improve but a less clear definition of the requirement and route to improvements.

We work with each organisation to define the aspects in which the organisation is strong and those where improvements can be delivered. We will assess its needs and plan a series of relevant improvements, always seeking both the most valuable and low hanging fruit.

We will often begin with an assessment followed by an option selection and prioritisation process.

This is summarised below:

Process Assessment for Program and Project Management

The purpose of the assessment is to help gain an understanding of the current program and project management processes within the organisation. The deliverable of this assessment is an action plan to improve those processes in line with the organisation's priorities and capabilities. This assessment is used by the Program Management Group to gain an in-depth knowledge of the processes and organisation, using the Program Management Maturity Model (PMMM) as a baseline to start the improvement process and also to compare against other organisation types.

The key activities for the assessment include:
Investigation of the current status: Using interviews, a kick off meeting and the Program Management Maturity Model (PMMM) we would benchmark each division of the organisation against the average of relevant industry wide averages.
Planning Improvements: Through discussion with the management team and structured interviews with stakeholders, we would evaluate the potential for improvement in each division using the PMMM profiles as a basis and the Program Management Improvement Process (PMIP) as a route map.
Presentation of Findings: Finally we would prepare a presentation to the management team outlining our proposals for phased improvements of maturity and therefore ability to deliver successful programs and projects. This report would identify the benefits to be gained from each phase in financial and non-financial terms.

Following this assessment we would implement the improvements in accordance with the plan using best practice program management to manage the work. Implementation might involve:
Implementing new processes
Establishing new defined roles
Publishing a methodology
Formal training workshops
Informal on the job training
Tool implementation

Throughout the improvement program we would monitor progress and regularly report on successes, challenges and benefit delivery.