The rescue service helps executives facing the following challenges:

• • projects running over budget with a lack of authenticity as to why

  • poor, generic and stale risk articulation with unrealistic mitigation actions and no accountability or owners

  • suppliers who frequently look to shift the blame, are not prepared to take ownership and appear to have forgotten who the customer is

  • well-meaning project managers who are unable to provide believable remediation plans

  • ambiguity around what success looks like with no measureable benefits or business outcomes.

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 pushed by highly-motivated sales people. A number of clients benefit from:

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

  • requirements extraction and product market scans

  • architecture developed to describe current and target states aligned to strategic goals

  • evaluation of vendors looking to implement and configure the chosen solution

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

Performing a large number of reviews each year enables clear insight into this area which can become muddled with jargon. As part of this process data is used to understand:

• if you are paying software license fees for software or modules you are not, in fact, using

• team performance using data process mining i.e. are all your IT engineers equally responsive/productive?

• compliance of service providers to contractual obligations i.e. are 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, automate manual processes or simply know what's going on in their own operations.

They also understand that this is a business issue. Without a well-designed strategy initiatives in this space tend to focus on data cleansing; often fruitless and doesn't deliver any meaningful change.

Direct experience in taking executives through data governance journeys:

• critical data flows are understood semantically and prioritised

• once set, the organisation can begin to assign ownership and move towards confident decision making.

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 rather than ahead of time where influence and experience could be useful.

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.