ASE were requested to provide services to turnaround a series of business critical projects across multiple Ministry of Justice (MOJ) ICT Programme and Projects Delivery (PPD) portfolios, all of which were in danger of failing to deliver to key business objectives and tolerances.
Background
ASE were charged with both the immediate goal of ensuring the successful delivery of these critical projects and the longer term goal of identifying and addressing recurrent delivery issues, thereby improving ongoing delivery across the MOJ ICT landscape. To deliver to these objectives ASE established a small team of consultants, flexing a range of their established services and adapting them to the specific challenges and needs of MOJ ICT.
Approach
Addressing Immediate Critical Delivery Issues
"Go2Green" - was a bespoke service developed for MOJ ICT. ASE developed a series of "Go2Green" workshops to address the immediate delivery issues. These were facilitated sessions run by ASE consultants with senior supplier, MOJ ICT and MOJ business representatives and SMEs.
The aim of the Go2Green exercise was two-fold. Firstly to openly identify and address the delivery issues of specific projects and establish new, realistic, and bought into delivery plans and approaches ensuring the projects' successful delivery. Secondly to establish a broader set of lessons learnt which ASE worked with both MOJ ICT and its suppliers to action, to ensure longer term delivery improvements where generic blockers to delivery were identified.
Portfolio/Programme/Project Leadership (3PL) Service Implementation
MOJ ICT identified critical skills gaps in their current delivery team which their existing PM contract supplier base had not been able to successfully cover. ASE were able, on short notice, to provide experienced PMs to lead two key projects, which required mature PMs able to re-build relationships between multiple suppliers and internal stakeholders to manage complex ,integrated delivery plans where no prime supplier was accountable for overall delivery.
As a result of the combined successes of these secondments, the Go2Green exercise, and the trust ASE had developed with MOJ ICT leadership through successfully delivering other core services, ASE were also requested to temporarily fill key senior leadership roles. ASE were able to re-organise their team to staff these roles with their most senior consultants, who had over 40 years of public sector delivery experience between them. In this manner ASE ensured continuity and excellence of leadership within the MOJ ICT department whilst providing MOJ ICT with the window to identify and recruit permanent replacements.
Outcome
Embedding Process Improvements
As well as ensuring the immediate turnaround of specific projects the other core aim of the ASE services was to ensure future MOJ ICT Programme and Projects delivery by identifying and embedding improved delivery processes. ASE took on ownership of two key MOJ owned initiatives aimed at improving delivery processes, tailoring existing ASE service offerings to provide:
A Solution Envisioning process for Project Start-Up and Initiation
Ineffective project start-up and initiation processes were identified as a key cause for failure during the Go2Green exercise.
ASE hence leveraged their existing Solution Envisioning Process (SEP) service, which is designed to be tailorable to the specific needs of any one project
(according to size, complexity, risk etc) to provide an efficient , cost-effective and repeatable accelerator for project start up on key projects and programmes. This approach was used successfully on the business critical GBS project which subsequently delivered to time and scope under budget, with the SE process recognised in the closing lessons learnt workshop as a key positive behind the project's success.
Process Maturity Assessments - managing the Business Process Re-Engineering Workstream and delivering the PM Delivery Processes Workstream
As part of MOJ ICT's Transformation Programme ASE took on ownership of multiple components within the Business Process Re-engineering (BPR) workstream, with the aim of raising the overall performance of MoJ ICT processes, creating a self-improving process framework within the organisation. ASE consultants not only managed the overall BPR workstream, but also developed a bespoke PM Maturity Model and leveraged their Maturity Assessment services experience to identify and then deliver PM process improvements.