Project delivery

The challenge

Large projects in the public sector face several well-known challenges. However, three areas are becoming increasingly more important to manage effectively:

The drive towards more shared services is making effective stakeholder management a key differentiator in the extent to which a project succeeds or fails.
The rate and sheer scale of change programmes in public sector organisations makes traditional define-design-develop-test-train-implement project schedules unsuitable in many cases. Adaptive delivery models are needed to ensure solutions are relevant to current business needs without swallowing the project budget through rework.
More than ever before organisations absolutely must demonstrate the extent to which their projects have delivered the expected value, and that the benefits have been realised as performance improvements and efficiency savings.

On top of this it is becoming less practical (and desirable) to co-locate a project team, which means project managers need effective ways of managing a team that is dispersed across several locations and organisations.

How can we help you?

Coraledge has an excellent track record of delivering strategically important projects for public sector clients. We adapt the project methodology to suit your circumstances, and then put the project management effort into building an effective project team, governance structure and communications strategy. Experience has shown that communication with stakeholders often starts strongly, but gets diluted as stakeholders come and go over time and other project pressures take priority. We strive to ensure that all stakeholders are kept up to date with significant changes, keeping expectations aligned as the project evolves.

We work hard to anticipate change and are experienced in working where many key aspects of the target environment are uncertain (such as office moves and organisation restructuring). Our approach ensures that we go live with a project that is still relevant to the business needs, whilst keeping rework to a minimum.

Crucially, we place great importance on benefits management. A good business case clearly states the benefits the project is expected to deliver, over what time scale, how we can demonstrate they have been realised, and who is resposible for realising them. In the past this was often the only time the benefits were seriously looked at, but this is no longer acceptable. As a project evolves in line with the changing organisation it is essential to keep the expected benefits up to date and shared with the stakeholders. Otherwise the business case is simply the start of an ever-widening gap between expectation and reality.

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A case study

Project Synopsis

The Council aims to dramatically improve service delivery to its customers. Underpinning this is a programme to implement an information management infrastructure linking up the front and back-office functions by making customer documents and records immediately available to front and back-office staff. The programme supports the Council's accommodation programme to deliver greater efficiency savings by reducing paper storage and implementing robust, compliant information management practices council wide. Benefits and outcomes were demonstrated through an office move of 400 staff and is a great example of putting the actions of the Varney review into action.

Aims and Objectives

Key objectives of the Project were:

Improve service - making customer correspondence immediately available to front-office staff equips them to provide faster, better-informed responses to customer enquiries. This frees back-office staff thereby improving the turnaround time for service delivery.
Improve efficiency - surveys showed staff spending up to 2 hours each day searching (often unsuccessfully) for paper records. Making records available electronically cuts this to a few minutes a day. Providing collaborative workspaces enables teams and directorates to share information and make working practices more efficient.
Save floor space - moving paper filing to offsite storage allows more productive use of costly office floor space. This means new offices can be smaller reducing real estate costs.
Improve compliance - in order to provide efficient and high-quality services to its customers, it needs to improve its information management practices.

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Solution

The Council created a dedicated project team and governance board headed by the Finance Director. The pressure was on to deliver, due to an imminent office move (4 months away) with no capacity to store the existing 3km of paper filing.

All paper files were listed and stored offsite, retrievable on a next-day basis.
A central scanning service was implemented to avoid a build-up of new paper.
New technology was rolled-out to 400 staff.
The solution was integrated with CRM and email.
Classroom training and follow-up support was provided.

The environment was extremely fluid, with ever-changing move dates, sequence, and staff numbers. The project team mitigated against the uncertainties, prioritising the core requirements over the highly desirable and nice to have.

Results and Benefits

The project went live in record time to 400 trained staff across 10 service areas simultaneously. 100% availability to date.
All paper filing was taken offsite on time via procured services and made available for retrieval. As a result of the exercise much more is known about the records held.
Customer-facing staff are able to resolve more enquiries on the first contact because full information is now immediately available.
Reducing the administrative burden has increased productivity, collaboration, and quality in the back-office.

The Council has also benefited from the approach taken to delivering the project:

It proved the effectiveness of the middleware integration strategy.
The project board is used as an example of Best Practice in the Senior Management training programme.
The lessons learned sessions used by the project has been incorporated into the Council's methodology for all strategic projects.

Future phases of roll-out have been approved.

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Cost Savings and Effectiveness

The project has provided opportunities to reduce storage requirements. Switching from paper to electronic record-keeping means the Council can release valuable office space, helping achieve accommodation efficiency targets. The accommodation savings to date are estimated at £3m. There are significant opportunities for efficiency savings within the service areas too. A number of vacant posts are being deleted as the back office processes have become more efficient.

The Council is building a central point for delivering and managing customer interactions. The project underpins this by bridging the gap between front and back office functions and providing immediate access to all customer related correspondence. It means we can improve customer service by being better able to respond to enquiries straight away, and allows back-office staff to be more productive in their areas of expertise.