Whether you are on the Board or running a complex project, you may not realise the true risks facing your organisation. We run assessments every year to help:

• • uncover any gaps in your current risk understanding

  • help you to understand your control framework and whether it is effective in mitigating your risks 

  • provide a view on any compound risks which may threaten the organisation as a whole, giving plain English scenarios to bring risk to life

  • Leave your teams with tools to continously manage and monitor risk going forward.

An ongoing partnership with PwC permits Independent Quality Assurance via their world-class and widely trusted project risk framework providing:

• the true risks facing your programme

• whether recovery is viable

• practical and realistic recovery options.

Investing in the right software is complicated with a vast array of options presented by highly-motivated sales teams. A number of clients benefit from:

• • an expert view on the maturity of contractual documentation and risk identification

  • rapid execution of the procurement process, bringing templates and tools to accelerate this time consuming process

  • architecture development to describe current and target states aligned to goals

  • scrutiny and evaluation of vendors looking to implement and configure your chosen solution.

Performing a large number of reviews each year enables a clear and structured approach in measuring performance. As part of this process data mining can be used to help understand:

• actual performance against KPIs and benchmarking i.e. are all your engineers equally responsive/productive?

• compliance of service providers to contractual obligations i.e. are your suppliers circumventing procurement controls? are they meeting the agreed SLAs?

An increasing number of industry leaders understand that poor data quality is hampering their ability to scale the business, tackle manual processes or simply know what's going on operationally.

They also understand that this is a business issue and not an IT problem. Without a well-designed strategy, initiatives in this space tend to focus on data cleansing; often fruitless and rarely delivers any meaningful change.

Direct experience in taking executives through data governance journeys:

• critical data flows are understood semantically and prioritised against the business

• helping the organisation to delegate ownership of data and process quality.

Regardless of the methodology, all projects are subject to project management triangle constraints (budget, time and scope) and the need to balance the impact each has on quality. Whilst it is important to manage and explain this core element, this triangle and many other common tools (e.g. regular status reporting, robust project plans, accurate forecasting) are the bare minimum a project manager should be bringing to the table.

For a project to be truly successful, a project manager should have a rich understanding of the change ahead. They should be able to empathise with your users and be prepared to make a similar emotional investment as the rest of the team.

Forward-looking risk
Managing risk is a core project management skill but often the risk register will be drafted and discarded, instead of being the living document which constantly maps and prioritises action.

Meaningful checkpoints
Projects must ensure sponsors retain control by creating checkpoints that align to critical project success points. In poorly run projects these tend to occur after the cost is committed/incurred or issues have already progressed leaving governance groups to deal with them after the fact where influence and experience has already been limited.

Measurable benefits
Poor benefit articulation lacks specificity and aims to placate decision makers with promise of efficiency or transparency. Each benefit statement should have a business owner, a clear and understandable measure of success plus a baseline taken prior to any change.

Plain English communication
Project managers that excel tend to have a deep technical background allowing translation of technical complexity to senior stakeholders whilst also being able to hold technical resources to account.