Our client’s 80 project managers were overloaded with several hundred projects.  Governance was ineffective and time-consuming, budgets and schedules weren’t being set or were over-running, performance criteria weren’t being set or measurably achieved and risks and inter-dependencies weren’t being managed.

In short, there was too little governance, too many initiatives and too few successes; leaving staff demoralised within a stressful  blame-culture.

The board wanted to spend less time managing projects but do more of them and better and the project managers needed more resources, fewer projects and clear deliverables.

We created portfolio and programme management workshops, systems and processes to capture and prioritise all initiatives into a properly resourced portfolio of programmes and projects then submitted a clear, succinct report on the current situation before presenting new PPM policy, strategies and plans that convinced the board to agree new portfolio governance arrangements through which initiatives could be submitted according to corporate rather than directorate priorities to maximise the use of available resources.

15% of projects were cancelled or combined, 10% of projects were deferred and matrix management of resources was introduced to increase capacity and properly support the remaining 75% of programmes.

Performance criteria were agreed for all programmes and projects allowing directors to manage by exception and project managers to spend less time reporting and more time managing successful delivery.  Stress and project slippage reduced considerably.