Prioritizing & Managing Projects
Companies conduct a growing amount of work through projects – often without consistency in approach and visibility into performance. Navigate provides the guidance and structure to help standardize processes, maximize resources, and better control risks to project success.
Project Management Office (PMO) project for an Energy company
Business Problem
The client had several business-related IT projects that were over budget and past their target completion dates. As a result, business stakeholders felt that IT was not supportive of operations and did not understand their needs and expectations.
Solution
Navigate helped improve the IT department’s project execution by:
- Driving business leadership to encourage increased influence for IT within company operations
- Implementing a right-sized structure to provide consistent reporting
- Guiding the Project Management Office (PMO) to align all project managers to priorities, budgets, and timelines
Outcome
As a result of Navigate’s involvement, the client realized the following benefits:
- Projects better aligned with business goals and clear expectations of all stakeholders more clearly articulated
- Projects completed on time and on budget, delivering strong business value and increased confidence in IT
- Improved project visibility for business stakeholders
- Standardized project execution, including training for new project managers
Project Management Office (PMO) project for a Pharmaceutical company
Business Problem
The client’s existing IT Project Management Office (PMO) capability was not sustainable to support its growing portfolio of business application projects and customer demand.
Solution
Navigate’s approach to assessing and improving the client’s PMO included:
- Facilitated work sessions to determine function requirements
- Design workshops to develop the newly proposed PMO structure
- Sharing of PMO leading practices and a peer-group comparison
- Content development, SharePoint configuration, and training for the new PMO model
Outcome
Navigate delivered a consolidated PMO model that included:
- Integrated project dependency map – to gain insight into how current projects impact each other
- SharePoint-based “PMO Handbook” to serve as the single location for all project documentation and templates
- Streamlined financial management practices and improved visibility
- Training and onboarding process for new project managers
Independent Program Advisory project for a global Pharmaceutical company
Business Problem
In an effort to reduce costs, key business support functions from the client’s shared administrative services were being outsourced. Support was needed to ensure this initiative would drive continuous process improvement, with the immediate objectives of timely execution and risk mitigation.
Solution
Navigate provided overall program management and independent advisory assistance with the process, transition/migration, organizational readiness, and post-transition activities. Specifically, Navigate:
- Managed and integrated the program and work streams to help ensure that the transition was efficient
- Provided effective management of the change for all stakeholders
- Identified and assessed risks to help ensure that the change was not only completed, but that the expected benefits of the change were also delivered and that all issues were appropriately managed
- Prepared the organization for the change, ensuring that operations met customer requirements from the beginning
Outcome
As a result of Navigate’s involvement:
- Annual cost reductions of $5M+ were realized
- Improvement opportunities were identified
- Program was executed on time and on budget
- Risks were identified and managed
- Knowledge transfer - from both an advisory and operational perspective - of the tasks required for transition ensured completeness and appropriateness