How East Surrey CCG set-up a value adding PMO

1. Establishing a Value-Adding
PMO in the NHS
Project Challenge 2016
Version 1.1
Prepared by: Catherine Onanda (Head of PMO)

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What is a CCG?
Clinical Commissioning Groups (CCGs) commission most of the hospital and
community NHS services in the local areas for which they are responsible.
Commissioning involves deciding what services are needed, and ensuring that
they are provided.
Services CCGs commission include:
most planned hospital care
rehabilitative care
urgent and emergency care (including out-of-hours)
most community health services
mental health and learning disability services

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East Surrey CCG – Who Are We?
NHS East Surrey Clinical Commissioning Group (the "CCG") has a membership of
18 GP practices and commissions healthcare for 170,000 patients in East Surrey.
We are committed to commissioning high quality patient services which deliver:
the right health care
at the right time
by the right healthcare professional
and in the right environment.

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Background
An external audit was conducted and recommended some improvements to
Governance and reporting on our projects
A new PMO was formed to oversee all projects and improve governance
We treated the new PMO as a project and designed it so that it was value adding
rather than box ticking
Project Manager Community were spending a lot of time compiling different
reports for different stakeholders
Reports were compiled in Excel and PowerPoint

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We needed ‘one version of the truth’

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What Projects and Programmes do we run?
East Surrey has over 50 projects that we need to deliver as well as 2 major
programmes:
Quality, Improvement, Productivity and Prevention (QIPP)
The (QIPP) programme is a large-scale programme developed by the Department of Health to drive forward
quality improvements in NHS care, at the same time as making up to £20 billion of efficiency savings
Transformation

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East Surrey sample list of Projects

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Our PMO’s Goal
“To implement a set of processes, templates and tools that allows the project
managers to focus on delivering their projects instead of compiling reports”
We wanted the project managers to value our PMO rather than considering it an
administrative burden

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Sponsorship
Like any Project, Sponsorship of the PMO was critical.
The Head of Projects was initially sceptical about the ‘administrative burden of a
new PMO’
We explained, communicated and showed how the new PMO would actually free up project
manger’s time die to:
No reinvention of the wheel
Standard processes and templates can be used
Implementation of a PMO tool would increase productivity
We met key executives who received project and programme governance reports
and explained the benefit of the new PMO
This communication and sponsorship was essential in getting buy-in to our new PMO

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Processes that we developed
Overall Project framework
Project Initiation
Gateways

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Visibility
We implemented a PMO Board showing status and progress of key initiatives:

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Governance
We identified the standard reports we needed at project, programme and
portfolio level.
We established a weekly drumbeat
Monday – weekly QIPP catch – up
Financial Director, Head of Transformation, Director of Transformation talk through each project,
using standard reports

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Our PMO Tool
To ensure we increased productivity we needed to move away from spreadsheets,
PowerPoint and MS Project. We needed a tool that would help us oversee projects
and programmes 24/7 so we could identify problems as early as possible.
Key requirements were:
Proven in the NHS
EASY TO USE!
Support for Gateways
A tool that we could start using simply and then extend as we as an organisation matures
Ability to report dynamically on groups of projects for different stakeholders
A responsive partner
After looking at a number of tools, we selected PM3 from Bestoutcome

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How Did we Sell the New Tool?
Using Project and Excel, the PMO were often chasing project managers for status
updates and reports collating projects
With the new tool, PM3, as long as the project data was up to date we produced
reports from PM3 and did not have to ask PMs for reports. This saved time and
was very popular
PM3 can group projects into portfolios in a couple of clicks and the reporting
engine can produce reports on this portfolio

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Portfolio Status Report

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QIPP dashboard

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PM3 – Portfolio Heatmap

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PM3 – Highlight Report

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How have we created a ‘value-adding PMO’ (1)
We provide a menu of services for the Project Managers
On-boarding of new project managers
Running planning sessions
Reviewing Risks and running risk workshops
Unblocking blockages
Helping with Stakeholder Engagement

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How have we created a ‘value-adding PMO’ (2)
Value is created by:
making the project managers’ lives easier
solve problems for them so they can focus on project delivery
The PMO presents their papers.
Project managers feel protected by the PMO.
The PMO saves time
Savings of 5 days of project manager time per week by not hand cranking.
More reliable information as we have one version of the truth
Gantt charts are scrutinised more; more interrogation.

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How have we created a ‘value-adding PMO’ (3)
There is no other option to using our tool and processes!
CFO and Executives like the new reports and are used to the format
Reports are automatically generated
On-boarding process has improved and made easier. It includes:
PM3
PMO processes,
What’s expected of a project manager
Reporting and Governance
We no longer ask project managers for reports as these are automatically
generated from PM3

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Summary and Lessons Learned
Treat the new PMO as a project in its own right
Sponsorship is crucial
Win hearts and minds of project managers by demonstrating the benefit of the
PMO and the tool
Pick the tool that is right for your organisation and must be ‘EASY TO USE’
Drumbeat of reporting so everyone knows what they need to do

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