With more projects and work requests than available funds, with overstretched resources and with the business threatening to add even more projects and work requests into the programme, our client sought help to review and re-prioritise their telecommunications programme of work.
With little in the way of business goals and objectives to guide us in assessing the programme of work, we worked with our client to firstly develop and agree a set of strategies, then to align the programme of work with the strategies.
With the strategies in place we were able to help our client undertake a more objective assessment of each project or work request, balancing risk versus investment versus return on investment – that’s programme management.
Working closely with the end user community to also determine business risk, business impacts and business benefit, we were able to align the programme of work to organisational outcomes rather than isolated, individual business unit outcomes.
Each project or work request was assessed to determine:
- Alignment with strategic objectives
- Capital investment required
- Operating cost impact
- Financial return on investment (NPV / IRR)
- Business benefit
- Operational impacts and benefits
Once this was done the projects and work requests were categorised into Quick Wins, Tactical Initiatives and Strategic Projects, where:
Quick Wins: Required little or no capital investment, were short in duration (typically 5 months or less) and provided rapid return on investment or benefit
Tactical Initiatives: Required medium levels of capital investment, the project or work request could be delivered within a year, return on investment would not be more than a year and the project or work request provided a more substantial business benefit
Strategic Projects: Required more significant levels of capital investment, project duration was likely to be more than six months, delivered more strongly to strategic objectives and outcomes, involved more significant organisational or business change, and provided significant levels of business benefit / return on investment
From this an executive-ready business case / business plan was developed incorporating a recommendation and justification for a 3 year prioritised programme of work.
Included in the business case / business plan was:
- An annual capital investment forecast
- An annual operating cost impact forecast
- An annual return on investment forecast
- A high level resource and operations impacts assessment
- A commercial and sourcing impact assessment
- Individual one-page business cases for each project and work request
During the engagement relevant and impacted client personnel were up-skilled and knowledge transferred and a handover to the client was done leaving them in a better position to manage the programme of work themselves moving forward.
Bottom line – problem solved.
From an unstructured set of work requests and projects with no clear outcome or objectives the client was delivered a structured programme of work delivering more $500,000 per annum in cost savings, an aggregate return of investment of over 100% per annum and significant flow-on business benefits.
Needless to say – a delighted client!