Senior management at a large university knew there were issues delivering projects on time due to a lack of resources. Many projects were months late causing low customer satisfaction. An assessment found many initiatives underway without senior managers' awareness. In response, a governance framework was created including processes to escalate project requests to senior levels for visibility of resource usage and skills needed. Work was also done to reprioritize projects and communicate delays and improvement actions to sponsors.

1. Project and programme methodology - a large university
Senior management knew that there were fundamental resource issues in delivering their
projects and programmes. Many projects and programmes were months late and, in some
cases, had delivered so long after their expected ‘go live’ date that the business had refused
to use them as they had embedded their own workarounds. Customer satisfaction levels
were at an all time low and the chief executive had made it clear that the situation had to
change or he would change his executive team!
Maven assessed all project and programme effort taking place across the organisation and
produced a map of projects that stunned senior managers - they had no idea that so many
initiatives were underway or planned and that numerous staff were starting work in reaction
to demands from the business that they felt unable to turn away, but were then abandoning
prior to completion because other ‘more serious’ projects arose.
In response to this passionate reaction Maven created a governance framework for all
projects and programmes. This included guidance on when to group projects together into a
single programme of work and the senior management responsibility for sponsoring projects
and programmes.
This governance framework included processes for escalating requests for projects to the
appropriate level of seniority so that the senior managers could get visibility of what their
resources were doing and what skills and competences were required. At the same time we
worked with the resources already impacted by their heavy workload to re-prioritise
projects so as to create a communications framework for contacting all project sponsors in
the business to explain the delays and what action was being taken to improve project
delivery.
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