Seven Consulting Portfolio and Program Delivery Tools
While delivering one of the largest portfolios of projects in Australia, with over 98% customer satisfaction annually. we have found that we have needed to build some tools to help de-risk delivery and assist our clients. Of these ten tools, we briefly covered three at our Seven Consulting Delivery Summit in Melbourne this year.
Firstly, we looked at Seven Consulting Pathfinder that through 120+ questions around program characteristics, produces the program delivery approach (into Jira or MS Project in 30 minutes), including workstream, deliverables, dependencies, delivery approach risks and mitigants. This tool considers both organisational and program characteristics to allow us to plan programs to a very high level of quality quickly and is used as a mandatory tool across a $4Bn Portfolio annually for us as well as by a number of our clients.
Over a three-year period, we developed a tool that helps us, within 30 minutes, to create the following for any project:
o Agree the optimised project delivery approach, Agile, Traditional (waterfall) or Blended.
o Understand the residual risks and mitigations for that approach.
o Specify the deliverables required for delivery many of which are agnostic to the Agile or Traditional approach.
o Detail the deliverables by phase and stream.
o Provide templates for each of the deliverables.
o Produce a detailed delivery approach, including dependencies, mapped to a schedule.
This tool is of best use for each of the following to assess or build delivery approach per project.
• Portfolio Managers
• ePMO or ITPMO Managers
• Risk and Assurance Stakeholders and Program Reviewers
• Project Managers stepping into larger or different roles
• Getting new or contract staff to deliver as per your methodology.
We use this tool across our whole technology change portfolio with over 40 client organisations and has led to an increase in customer satisfaction to over 99% in every year since introduction.
Secondly, we looked at Seven Consulting’s Portfolio Optimisation Tool, which helps our clients force rank their potential and existing programs & projects against their organisational priorities and then overlay capacity constraints to design the optimum portfolio. This tool has been user by a number of our clients to supercharge their portfolios and de-risk delivery.
The Portfolio Optimisation Tool helps clients manage and prioritise their project portfolios based on a set of business priorities and deliverability constraints.
Key features of the Portfolio Optimisation Tool include:
• Captures business and deliverability factors, constraints and strategic pillars used for determining prioritisation.
• Collects key project information used for prioritisation including dependency with other projects.
• Provides a recommendation on project prioritisation according to alignment to organisational objectives with an overlay of available capacity.
• Provides a summary dashboard for leadership view on project ranking and business versus deliverability factors.
• Allows executives to override prioritisation recommendation and reflect group’s final prioritisation but showing loss of benefits and resource gaps.
Finally, we looked at Seven Consulting’s PRISM (Project Risk Impact and Suggested Mitigations) tool. Seven Consulting has understood that the delivery risk of a project is the single most important Lead Indicator of a project’s likelihood for success. However, the current state of Project Delivery Risk Management is poor:
• The P.M.I states that Risk Management is the least understood practice in the PMBOK;
• Many project managers use inconsistent, ad-hoc processes for risk assessment or borrowed risk assessments from other projects;
• Too many projects (Sponsors and Project Managers) see Risk Management as either a passive box-ticking or reactive process not a pro-active and constructive one;
• The quality of a project risk assessment is determined by the experience of the project manager i.e. the more experienced the project manager more likely their assessment of risk will be comprehensive
• It is difficult to share learnings about project risk across projects and organisations
Embedding decades of research and learnings from real-life projects about project risks, impacts and mitigation actions, Seven Consulting developed a unique and simple tool that brings consistency to analysing project risks, considering the impact of those risks on critical project factors such as Schedule Compliance, Estimation Accuracy Team Health and Sponsor Engagement requirements. In addition, PRISM also has a set of suggested mitigations for the higher risk factors.
Most importantly, PRISM provides executive undertaking sponsor and governance roles assurance that the potential delivery risks facing their project have been comprehensively understood and analysed using the shared learnings within Seven Consulting from delivering billions of dollars of projects for its clients.
Seven Consulting’s PRISM (Project Risk, Impact and Suggested Mitigations) has three key components:
Component 1: Project Risk Assessment
Comprehensive and tested Project Delivery Risk Assessment which calculates overall Project Delivery Risks and creates an initial RAID Log.
Component 2: Risk Impact Analysis
An analysis of the potential impact of unmitigated risks from Component 1 across 10 key project factors such as Schedule, Organisation Change and Team Health
Component 3: Suggested Risk Mitigation Actions
A comprehensive set of proposed Risk Mitigation Actions aligned to the 10 key project factors and filtered by urgency
If you would like to understand more, we have an overview of these and other tools at https://www.sevenconsulting.com/topic/22-sc-tools-capability-statement/. If you’d like to further discuss whether we can assist you, please contact Declan.Boylan@sevenconsulting.com
Program Director at Seven Consulting
1moThe Portfolio Optimisation Tool (POT) ranks your portfolio of projects according to benefits achieved and ability to deliver. It considers a large number of factor such as strategic priorities, regulatory must do projects and resource constraints. It helps an organisation rebalance its portfolio of projects as things change during the year. Nice colours too 🤩
Program Director at Seven Consulting
1moThe PRISM tool provides an executive view of a program's key risks and suggested mitigation strategies. A different view compared to the large risk registers developed on large programs.