Case Study 1 - A leading project and programme management consultancy
Challenge
This company is one of the UK’s leading consultancies in programme and project management. Started as a joint venture between Cranfield University and eight of the UK’s major blue chips, the company’s commercial success caused it move to an independent commercial operation. Since then it has achieved very substantial year on year growth, with a significant market presence in the education and training market. However, the development of the company’s associated products in consultancy and provision of interim specialists had lagged behind and was inhibiting the company’s development.Nick was brought in to focus specifically on this area and to develop and change the products, processes and approach for the company.
Delivery
In this position, Nick:- Re-engineered the consultancy product offering to move from individual product offerings to ‘cradle to grave‘ support for customers
- Overhauled the use of the CRM system to support delivery consultancy and provided user requirements for the development of the new in-house CRM system
- Worked with CITI sales staff to increase awareness of delivery opportunities.
Benefits
Increased monthly consultancy revenue by 80 %Case Study 2 - A FTSE 100 conglomerate
Challenge
This company is one of the UK’s largest engineering conglomerates. It employs some 50,000 people worldwide in 300 companies. Senior management initiated a major strategic move from a loosely associated group of companies to a unified group with a single overall identity and approach to its customers & suppliers. In parallel with this and to support the change, the company outsourced its world wide IT operation.These changes required the way that the company controlled its IT to be fundamentally re-assessed, and the Global Director of Programmes brought Nick in to design, and put in place the process, technology and culture change necessary to allow the company to exercise control over an IT budget of about $200M.
Delivery
Nick was responsible for:- Assisting in the development of the new Group IT structure
- Achieving consensus with the most senior stakeholders in each major group on the central governance to be applied to IT projects
- Creating a set of unified processes to initiate, authorise and control all changes to IT systems
- Developing with IBM the necessary changes to their internal processes & systems to support the central governance regime
- Developing and facilitating the communications forums necessary to support these processes.
- Developing and putting in place the necessary technology to support the process.
Benefits
With this work in place, the company was able to:- Identify £23M of non-performing projects as candidates for closure
- See how money was being spent within the outsource contract.
- Understand what IT work is being proposed globally, and view how it links to strategic business objectives and the overall IT strategy
- Prioritise IT work
- Be alerted to IT projects which are in danger
Case Study 3 - A market leader in the sale of mid range accounting systems
Challenge
This company was the market leader in the sale of mid-range accounting systems. It is a $100M turnover company employing some 900 staff. The development arm of the company was failing and had not delivered a new release in the last two years. The company appointed Nick as CIO of the Research and Development division to aggressively change the processes and culture and to deliver the modern product that the company needed to survive.In this position Nick was responsible for all software development, and had some 220 staff reporting directly to him. This was a mixed technology environment with major development teams in both Java and Cobol. He had budget responsibility for £9.5M.
Delivery
In the 18 months that Nick was at the company, he:- Completely restructured the development organisation to provide a fast track, OO based development capability
- Moved the company’s technical strategy to support E-Business
- Delivered two major product releases. This involved enhancing 63% of all of the current product software, and delivering an entirely new product offering, (approximately 150,000 lines of code).
Benefits
Nick delivered the ‘E-Business Gateway’, which gave the company a leading edge capability in the E-Commerce marketplace.Nick Recovered the ‘Version 5’ programme, a £5M technology step change for the company and one that was running approximately 15 months late. The revised plan met all of its milestones, and delivered to market on time and on budget
Case Study 4 - A world leader in the supply of technical information to the international research community.
Challenge
The company found its future growth hampered by the existing business processes, the in-house culture and the systems base. A major business change programme, (the Phoenix project), was initiated to completely restructure the organisation, business processes, and IT systems. After nine months the project was faltering, and beginning to miss its key milestones The project is critical to the success of the company and the decision was made to put the total programme under the control of a single programme manager. Nick was asked to undertake this role.Delivery and Benefits
As programme manager Nick has:- On a programme budget of £9M, reduced the overall projected budget from an overspend of £1M to an underspend of £150K
- Brought forward the completion of departmental re-organisation by 2 months
- Brought forward the initial IT delivery by 6 months.
- The cost saving and benefits that were planned in the original business case have been exceeded