With experience in correcting major projects in the Lloyd's of London insurance market together with a strong software development background, the rescue service helps executives facing the following challenges:

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

  • poor, generic and stale risk articulation with a lack of clarity on specific mitigation actions and responsibilities

  • 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 a believable remediation plan 

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

An ongoing partnership with PwC permits an Independent Quality Assurance service offering via their world-class and widely trusted project risk framework.

Get in touch and we will quickly assess how best to help your governance team gain an independent view of:

• true risks facing your programme

• whether recovery is viable

• what, if any, course corrections can be made to recover.

Currently sitting on a number of IT governance bodies across the country, we also have direct experience in establishing/refreshing an existing technology oversight committee.

Investing in the right software is complicated with a growing range of options and highly motivated sales people.

We can help by:

• • running your procurement process, bringing templates and tools to accelerate this time consuming process

  • evaluating and assessing vendors who are looking to implement and configure your chosen solution

  • rapidly extracting your requirements and performing product market scans, drawing upon our experience to narrow the options

  • helping to build an architecture to describe your current and target states aligned to your strategic goals

  • forming an expert view on the maturity of contractual documentation and provide advice on strengthening the level of protection offered.

Whether you require an independent view on current IT service performance or you need help in deciding whether to continue with a failing project, we can help.

Performing a large number of reviews each year enables us to provide clear insight into this area which can become muddled with jargon and the true issue shielded. As part of this process we can use your data to better understand:

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

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

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

An increasing number of industry leaders understand that poor data quality is hampering their ability to scale the business and automate manual processes. They also understand that this is not an IT issue but a business one. Without a well designed strategy initiatives in this space tend to focus on data cleansing; often fruitless and won't deliver any meaningful change.

We bring direct experience in taking executives through data governance journeys in order that critical data flows are understood semantically and prioritised. From there, the organisation can begin to assign owners to build trust and move towards confident decision making.

Regardless of the chosen methodology, all projects are subject to project management triangle constraints (budget, time and scope) and the need to balance the impact each dimension 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) are the bare minimum a project manager should be bringing to the table.

For a project to be truly successful, your 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.

By being directly involved and having trusted oversight on hundreds of technology projects, experience brings a sense of what both bad and good look like with a clear view on how to address the former and build upon the latter. Our key project management difference is providing:

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 document which maps and prioritises action.

Meaningful checkpoints
Projects must ensure sponsors retain control by creating checkpoints that align to critical project success points. Traditionally 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 they could apply influence.

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 taking place.

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