ASE had been engaged by the MOJ ICT department to run a "Go2Green" exercise.
Background
The goals of this exercise were:
- to turnaround critical, failing, projects and ensure their delivery success;
- to then identify and embed ongoing processes that would improve and ensure future programmes' and projects' delivery.
Approach
As well as a series of Portfolio, Programme and Project delivery process improvements the need for an ongoing set of Delivery Assurance services were identified as a priority.
ASE worked closely with the MOJ ICT Programme and Project Delivery (PPD) leadership team to design, embed and then handover a suite of Delivery Assurance (DA) services. The services were designed to be flexible and to be utilised across the entire portfolio of projects and programmes - regardless of scale, supplier or delivery methodology used. The challenge was complicated by the recent mergers of multiple departments, including 'Access to Justice', National Offender Management Service and other arm's length bodies, which meant there were multiple supplier and internal process delivery models in place. Hence the DA processes developed needed to be able to be adaptable to varying delivery models and still provide a consistent means of assuring programmes and projects.
The DA Services in detail
ASE developed two services run by an ASE staffed DA team. This team was trained in both services enabling the team to flex across the offerings and ensure continuity of service. The team varied in size and skill sets over a 9 month period with ASE retaining accountability for meeting overall agreed service levels .
Outcome
Milestone Assurance (MA) - a bespoke offering
Goal: to provide a means to engage suppliers and MOJ stakeholders to re-baseline critical projects whose plans were slipping, mitigate identified RAIDs and ensure successful delivery to newly agreed plans
Approach: an independent team of suppliers and client SMEs (e.g. Architects, PMs) was formed for each project. Current plans were then shared with the review team and the delivery plan presented with associated RAIDs. After assessment of the achievability of the plan a re-baselined plan and associated set of tracking metrics was established, ensuring key deliverables and threats to delivery were mitigated and tracked. Progress against the plan was tracked on a weekly basis by a milestone assurance governance team led by the MA lead - at any one time up to 5 projects were under MA at MOJ.
Independent Health Check Service Implementation
Goal: To provide a consistent and repeatable approach to review programmes or projects whose delivery achievability/overall approach/or business case were in doubt, confirm overall status and make recommendations to ensure the project met its and broader business objectives to clearly defined tolerances
Approach: ASE's Health Check Service leverages a proven assessment toolkit covering all aspects of Project Management Best Practice (e.g. Lifecycle stage management, PM processes management etc.). It was employed to provide a consistent, quantitative but still tailorable basis for independent reviews where a broader assessment of a project's health and achievability was required. Outcomes of these reviews included a complete change of solution direction to meet business case constraints, through to a change of programme leadership and re-focus on long term solution supportability. In every case the Health Check recommendations were accepted by the sponsoring SRO and recommendations implemented.
Handing Over the Delivery Assurance Service
The final stage of the DA service involved handing over the now embedded services to the MOJ ICT team. To enable this the service was shadowed by members of the leadership team and all processes, tools and templates were handed over to provide the team with both the experience and tools to run the service going forward.