Project Management
What is it?
Project management is all about creating an environment and conditions in which to achieve a particular goal or objective - in a controlled manner, usually with a team of people.
That team is focussed on producing an end product or service that benefits the organisation or effects change. The end result can be tangible or intangible.
Getting to that end result, successfully, is what project management is all about. At its core, project management centres on the planning and control of everything involved in delivering the end result.
Project management is a profession, with best outcomes achieved with seasoned Project Managers who can tailor their approach in applying best practises that are applicable in the organisation and project they are leading.
In its simplest form, project management focuses on three key areas, Cost, Time and Quality. The right Project Manager will create a culture within their project, where these three elements have absolute focus, and are controlled throughout, to deliver on-time, on-budget and on-quality.
Project management is about guaranteed outcomes. Time and again, when applied properly, the discipline of managing complex or high risk change via projects has proven to be the most cost-effective and reliable method of achieving the desired outcomes.
How can it benefit you?
Simply, return on investment.
A properly managed and governed project will achieve the outcomes it sets out to achieve, keeping all stakeholders informed of the status, risks and issues throughout.
Importantly, stakeholders feel in control of what is happening, with a well run and governed project. This provides opportunities to steer the project in different directions when changes are required. Importantly, it also allows stakeholders to clearly see when things are not going to plan, and indeed if the business justification for the project is no longer viable. A project provides means to identify issues ahead of time and either make changes, or even stop the project, preventing wasted effort and costs.
Whatever the outcomes needed, project management disciplines can control the achievement of them, providing certainty around what will be delivered, when it will be delivered, and what the costs (people, materials) will be.
Whether a company is looking to make small changes or go through enormous transitions or transformation, elements of project management can help all sizes and scales of change. If you want to undergo change and you want certainty over time, cost and quality, project management is the best practise approach to achieve it.
What Kanri offer
Kanri’s PPM team can assist you in many ways, including:
- End-to-end management of any project you are considering, to achieve your business outcomes.
- Project rescue, to either take over a failing project, or to assist your team in getting it back on track.
- Early stage planning, to test your business case viability.
- Project start-up activities, to help with the planning of the project. Not just with scope, budget, and schedule, but also with establishing the governance and reporting required to ensure key stakeholders are informed and in control throughout the life of the project.
- Project health checks, to ascertain whether your project status is where it is reported to be.
- Project review, to understand how your project is being managed, to provide insight and surety to key stakeholders.
- Facilitate Lessons Learned exercises during and/or at the end of your project, to ensure the successes and failures, however small, are all acknowledged, and that the lessons from them are learned within your business.
- Facilitate Risk Mining sessions at the start and/or during the project, to ensure that all the bumps in the road ahead will be identified in a timely manner, and appropriately communicated and managed. An enormous part of successful project delivery is down to successful risk management
- Tailored coaching, training and mentoring of your teams and individuals to help them better understand and manage projects, with a focus on understanding best practice and tailoring it to your own environment and needs. This includes senior stakeholders who may want to understand how to best govern and control a project.
Programme Management
What is it?
Programme management is the coordinated management of multiple related projects and change initiatives to achieve beneficial business outcomes.
A programme usually starts with a vision of a changed organisation and the benefits that will accrue from the change. Delivering the changed organisation will involve coordinating a number of projects and ensuring that their outputs are used to deliver the benefits. As well as the delivery of the individual projects, programme management also considers requirements for any change management of business-as-usual activities.
Typically, the desired benefits are initially identified within a business case that justifies the necessary investment. A detailed specification of the end state of the programme is called a blueprint. However, the scale of programmes, the fact they usually run over many months or years, and the impact of a dynamic business environment mean that intermittent or regular redefinition of the blueprint may be required. Programme management effectively captures the changing requirements and ensures the programme and its projects are aligned.
Programme management can also ensure the ongoing realisation of the business benefits. When a project is complete, it closes, but the programme remains open, often months afterwards, to ensure the realisation of the benefits that were outlaid in the business case and blueprint. In other words, the programme is responsible for realisation of the vision.
How can it benefit you?
Today's organisations exist in a climate of constant and increasing change. Organisations that have learned how to transform themselves through effective leadership and strategic control are more likely to survive and prosper. Programme management is increasingly being recognised as key to enabling organisations to manage that transformation.
Where there is major change there will be complexity, risk, many interdependencies to manage, and conflicting priorities to resolve. Organisations are unlikely to be able to deliver change successfully where:
- There is insufficient board-level support
- Leadership is weak
- There are unrealistic expectations of the organizational capacity and capability to change
- There is inadequate focus on benefits
- There is no real picture of the future capability
- There is a poorly defined or poorly communicated vision
- The organization fails to change culture
- There is not enough engagement of stakeholders
Programme management employs a structured framework and approach that can help organisations avoid these pitfalls and achieve their goals.
What Kanri offer
Kanri’s PPM team can assist you in many ways, including:
- End-to-end management of any programme you are considering, to achieve your business outcomes.
- Programme rescue, to either take over a failing programme, or to assist your team in getting it back on track.
- Early stage planning, to test your business case viability.
- Programme start-up activities, to help with the planning of the programme.
- Programme health checks, to ascertain whether your programme status is where it is reported to be.
- Programme review, to understand how your programme is being managed, to provide insight and surety to key stakeholders.
- Facilitate Lessons Learned exercises during and/or at the end of your programme, to ensure the successes and failures, however small, are all acknowledged, and that the lessons from them are learned within your business.
- Facilitate Risk Mining sessions at the start and/or during the programme, to ensure that all the bumps in the road ahead will be identified in a timely manner, and appropriately communicated and managed. An enormous part of successful realisation of the business benefits is down to successful risk management
- Tailored coaching, training and mentoring of your teams and individuals to help them better understand and manage programmes, with a focus on understanding best practise and tailoring it to your own environment and needs. This includes senior stakeholders who may want to understand how to best govern and control a programme.
Portfolio Management
What is it?
Portfolio management helps organisations make decisions about implementing the right changes to their business as usual activity via projects and programmes. Portfolio management is not concerned with the detailed management of these projects and programmes; rather, it approaches the management of change projects and programmes from a strategic viewpoint.
Rather than representing a new discipline, portfolio management seeks to build on, and better coordinate, existing processes such as strategic planning, investment appraisal and project and programme management.
Portfolio Management helps organisations answer the fundamental question: Are we sure this investment is right for us and how will it contribute to our strategic objectives?
Investment is the key word because portfolio management is about investing in the right change initiatives and implementing them correctly.
- Are we doing these things right?
- Are we realising all the benefits in terms of more effective services and efficiency savings from the changes we are implementing?
How can it benefit you?
Some of the key things organisations notice from well adopted portfolio management:
- Faster, more consistent and more transparent decision making.
- Visibility of what projects and programmes are underway, how they are progressing, and what benefits will be realised.
- More of the right change initiatives are undertaken, and any that do not align to strategic objectives, or are performing poorly, are removed at an earlier stage.
- A balanced portfolio in terms of risk, timing and overall contribution to strategic objectives.
- More efficient use of limited resources, including money, staff and management attention.
- Greater transparency and accountability.
- More reliable business delivery via improved management of the change initiative pipeline, dependencies between initiatives, and organisational constraints.
- More effective performance management – redirecting resources to priority activities.
- Increased benefits realisation via active management to ensure the business actually changes and exploits the capabilities delivered to it.
In a report for the Cabinet Office, significant benefits were reported from implementing even basic levels of portfolio management. Just establishing an organisation-wide view of all active and planned initiatives can provide substantial financial saving by presenting the opportunity to remove low-value, duplicate and poorly performing initiatives, and by gaining insight into how investments in one part of the organisation can be exploited elsewhere. These benefits grow as the organisation gradually incorporates portfolio management into its daily business routine.
What Kanri offer
Kanri’s PPM team can assist you in many ways, including:
- Work with your senior management to understand your business and present an applicable way to introduce or further mature a portfolio management approach.
- Deliver a portfolio management implementation or maturity uplift project/programme.
- Establish a portfolio definition by undertaking a review of all change initiatives planned and underway, the category and priority of each, with strategic alignments and misalignments clearly documented.
- Work with your existing portfolio management teams to re-establish culture, progress and momentum, where this has dwindled or is not meeting expectations.
- Align governance across your portfolio, programme(s) and project(s), to ensure appropriate and timely reporting and decision making.
- Establish a portfolio office to provide support and assurance for all change initiatives and facilitate effective and timely decision making.
- Facilitate change culture adoption workshops and behaviour embedding within your organisation, to establish the energized change culture, critical to transformation.
- Tailored coaching, training and mentoring of your teams in establishing a portfolio management approach to strategy execution. This can include subject awareness and capability, tools and technique training, or on-the-job shadowing.
- Fulfilling key roles or skill gaps in your portfolio management organisation to help establish the discipline, or raise the maturity level of its execution.
- Portfolio health checks, to ascertain whether your portfolio status is where it is reported to be.
- Portfolio review, to understand how your portfolio is being managed, to provide insight and surety to key stakeholders.
Portfolio, Programme & Project Offices (P30, PMO)
What is it?
Most commonly called a PMO, the model provides a decision enabling, support and assurance structure for all change within an organisation. This may be provided through a permanent office, or through temporary offices that exist for the life of a programme or project.
Looking at it simply, the PMO provides two general functions to a changing business, those of support and assurance, which can be succinctly broken down as:
Support
- Act as the central hub of PPM expertise in an organisation, providing the right tools, documentation, guidance, standards, and often resources, to Projects, Programmes and Portfolios (P3s).
- Gather and hold data to then create and communicate audience-specific reporting for decision making, governance and awareness.
- Ensure effective communication to all parties, for all P3s and the wider organisation.
- Provide training, mentoring and coaching for those involved in a P3.
- Identify and manage dependencies between P3s.
- Offer decision making escalation support to P3s.
Assurance
- Ensure consistency of approach across all P3s.
- As the PMO does not have project delivery accountability, it will provide independent review of P3 project status, health and compliance.
- Ensure accuracy of reporting from a P3.
- Ensure scrutiny and challenge
- Quality assurance
- When applied at the Portfolio level, it ensures only strategically aligned projects and programmes are executed.
How can it benefit you?
A PMO is expected to bring about improved quality and savings by more efficient and successful project, programme and portfolio management.
Via ownership of methodologies and assurance of compliance across all projects, it makes sure all involved have their needs, wishes and requirements satisfied.
It ensures consistency across all aspects of business change, making outcomes predictable.
It facilitates value-for-money acquisition and continuity of expertise via its centralised model.
A well implemented PMO, with a focus on continual improvement ensures that:
- You are doing the right things
- You are doing things right
What Kanri offer
Kanri’s PPM team can assist you in many ways, including:
- Work with your senior management to understand your business and its approach to change, to define the most applicable PMO model for your organisation.
- Deliver a PMO implementation or maturity/capability uplift project/programme.
- Work with your existing PMO teams to re-establish their service offerings, where this is not meeting expectations.
- Align PMOs across your portfolio, programme(s) and project(s), to ensure consistent application of support and assurance.
- Tailored coaching, training and mentoring of your teams in establishing or uplifting a PMO. This can include capability, tools and technique training, or on-the-job shadowing.
- Fulfilling key roles or skill gaps in your PMO to help establish the discipline, or raise the maturity level of its execution.
- PMO reviews and health checks, to ascertain whether your PMO is delivering and being managed as it is reported to be. Whilst the PMO provides assurance that the projects, programmes and portfolios are being effectively managed and executed, often the PMO itself goes unchecked.
Risk Management
What is it?
Risk management is all about making better business decisions in a world of uncertainty. When you practice risk management, you try to reduce things that may have a negative impact on your business. You also look for opportunities in uncertainty, that can have a positive impact.
It allows you to identify the different types of risk and when events in your business will allow you to dictate the opportunities from them.
You won't always have enough information, knowledge or resources to identify or manage every risk. A good risk management plan will allow you to change your approach if it isn't working or if you come across an unexpected risk.
Good risk management is structured, repeatable and effective. There are many good practise approaches to risk management, all with very similar themes. Choosing the right approach is key and should be based upon how applicable it is in your business and how easily it can integrate with other existing business processes.
With good risk management, comes visibility of the bumps in the road ahead, enabling timely decision making to navigate them. Some of the biggest challenges in applying risk management include:
- Overcomplicating the approach, reducing likelihood of it becoming part of every employees second-nature practise and attitude.
- Lack of demonstrated accountability for the various roles in the risk management organisation.
- Inadequate processes, leading to poor identification and treatment of risks.
- A reduction of adoption and momentum following a high-energy initial implementation of risk management.
How can it benefit you?
Effective risk management can bring far-reaching benefits to all organisations, whether large or small, public or private sector, as well as individuals managing projects or programmes.
It can improve performance against objectives by contributing to:
- Fewer sudden shocks and unwelcome surprises
- More efficient use of resources
- Reduced waste
- Reduced fraud
- Better service delivery
- Reduction in management time spent fire-fighting
- Better management of contingent and maintenance activities
- Lower cost of capital
- Improved innovation
- Increased likelihood of change initiatives being achieved
- More focus internally on doing the right things properly
- More focus externally to shape effective strategies
What Kanri offer
Kanri’s PPM team can assist you in many ways, including:
- Work with your senior management to understand your business and its risk appetite, to define the most applicable risk management approach for your organisation.
- Deliver a risk management implementation or maturity/capability uplift across your business or in a department.
- Work with your existing risk management teams to re-establish their service offerings, where this is not meeting expectations.
- Align risk management across your business operations, portfolio, programme(s) and project(s), to ensure consistent application.
- Fulfilling key roles or skill gaps in your risk management teams to help establish the discipline, or raise the maturity level of its execution.
- Risk management health checks, to ascertain whether your Risk Profile is where it is reported to be.
- Risk management review, to understand how your risk approach is being managed, to provide insight and surety to key stakeholders.
- Facilitate Risk Mining sessions across your business, within a department, or at the start and/or during a project, to ensure that all the bumps in the road ahead will be identified in a timely manner, and appropriately communicated and managed.
- Tailored coaching, training and mentoring of your teams and individuals to help them better understand and manage risk, with a focus on understanding best practise and tailoring it to your own environment and needs. This includes senior stakeholders who may want to understand how to best govern and control business risks.
Value Management
What is it?
There has never been a greater need to demonstrate value for money in the delivery of essential outputs and services. Organisations are faced with unprecedented pressures to remain competitive and thrive. Non-essential services and projects need to be cut or scaled back in order to accommodate significant reductions in available budgets and, at the same time, there remains the same need to minimize the impact of these reductions on customers and end-users.
Value management is a discipline focussed on gaining the most efficient use of resources to maximize the benefits from portfolios, programmes and projects. This is achieved through the use of unique tools and techniques, focussed on extracting the right information and making the right value decisions.
Value management helps to deliver more of the right things, for less and leads to more effective use of available resources. In some circumstances, value may be added by stopping certain activities or projects. Value management provides a way of addressing this in an objective and auditable manner.
Value management uses a definition of value that embraces both monetary and non-monetary benefits, and argues that the subjectivity of value increases the need for it to be actively managed. It provides a method for allocating scarce funds as effectively as possible.
Value management enhances, rather than competes with, other management methods that seek to achieve value. It does not require more bureaucracy, and management support should be proportionate to the circumstances.
How can it benefit you?
Adopting a formal value management approach enables you to:
- Clarify your organisations value priorities.
- Make optimum use of potentially scarce resources, including money, time, energy and materials.
- Helps you to deliver what you need to do for less.
- Provides a means to define projects’ objectives and scope clearly in terms of the organisation’s and end users’ short and long-term needs.
- Supports your decision making based upon maximising value for money.
- Identifies those projects that will add most value to a programme, taking account of risk and reward.
- Encourages innovation that is well aligned to your organisations goals.
- Facilitates the optimum balance between investment and long-term operating expenditure.
- Provides the means to measure and audit value added, taking accounting for monetary and non-monetary benefits
- Establishing effective consultation with and engagement of key stakeholders and end users to reconcile their differing needs.
The greatest opportunities for increasing value occur in the early stages of a programme or project.
Many organisations will, initially, wish to introduce value management on a project-by-project basis, either to demonstrate its effectiveness or because, due to the nature of the business or their size, demand does not warrant setting up their own internal practitioners to apply value management.
What Kanri offer
Kanri’s PPM team can assist you in many ways, including:
- Work with your senior management to understand your business and its value priorities, to define the most applicable value management approach for your organisation.
- Deliver a value management implementation, trial, or maturity/capability uplift across your business or in a project or programme.
- Work with your existing value management teams to re-establish their service offerings, where this is not meeting expectations.
- Align value management across your business operations, portfolio, programme(s) and project(s), to ensure consistent application.
- Fulfilling key roles or skill gaps in your value management teams to help establish the discipline, or raise the maturity level of its execution.
- Value management health checks, to ascertain whether your value management status is where it is reported to be.
- Value management review, to understand how your value approach is being managed, to provide insight and surety to key stakeholders.
- Tailored coaching, training and mentoring of your teams and individuals to help them better understand, manage and extract value, with a focus on understanding best practise and tailoring it to your own environment and needs. This includes senior stakeholders who may want to understand how to best govern and control value and investment.
Benefits Management (Benefits Realisation)
What is it?
Benefits management is a structured, repeatable and effective way of managing how time and resources are invested into making desirable changes.
The reason organisations invest in projects and programmes is to realise benefits. As such benefits can be in terms of: increased revenue; efficiency savings; some tangible contribution to a strategic objective or business priority; risk mitigation; to meet a legal or regulatory requirement; or maintain business as usual.
Benefits are therefore not just one dimension of project and programme management – rather, they are the rationale for the investment in change initiatives. As such benefits are, or at least should be, the driver behind all change initiatives.
Yet reports from professional bodies, audit agencies and academic research show that organisations in the public, private and 3rd sectors continue to struggle to demonstrate a return on investments in change, with failure rates commonly in the 50-70% range.
If value is to be created and sustained, benefits need to be actively managed through the whole investment lifecycle. From describing and selecting the investment, through programme scoping and design, delivery of the programme to create the capability and execution of the business changes required to utilise that capability, and the operation and eventual retirement of the resulting assets. Unfortunately, this is rarely the case.
The discipline of end-to-end benefits management closes the gap between strategy planning and execution.
How can it benefit you?
- Forecast realistic benefits to produce business cases which address business issues and objectives and provide a route to measure success.
- Deliver reliable business cases on which to base investment decisions.
- Facilitate an organisation-wide understanding of the benefits a project or programme will produce and be able to measure when they are realised.
- Enable organisations to demonstrate more efficient and effective practices through better use of available resources.
- Prevent cognitive biases affecting benefits forecasting.
- Prevent any planned, systematic, deliberate misstatement of costs and benefits to get projects and business cases approved.
- Prevent any overstating of benefits in order to get projects and business cases approved.
- Ensure forecasts are subject to robust and independent challenge and scrutiny, with business cases containing disconfirming evidence.
- The benefits from change initiatives are clearly identified in measurable terms that demonstrate strategic contribution.
- Benefits forecasts are robust and realisable.
- Benefits are expressed and quantified consistently by all change initiatives so enabling reliable portfolio prioritisation.
- Responsibilities are clearly defined for realising each benefit.
- The investment rationale and value-for-money position is tested on a regular basis with formal re-commitment to benefits realisation so that there are no ‘orphan’ initiatives.
- Benefits realisation is monitored on an active basis with prompt corrective action being taken to address emerging shortfalls and to mitigate known and emergent dis-benefits.
- Effective action is taken to identify and leverage emergent benefits.
- Checks are undertaken to assess whether the performance matched ‘the promise’ and identify and apply lessons learned.
What Kanri offer
Kanri’s PPM team can assist you in many ways, including:
- Work with your senior management to understand your business and present an applicable way to introduce or further mature a benefits management approach within your entire organisation, a department, or a specific programme.
- Deliver a benefits management implementation or maturity uplift project/programme.
- Work with your existing benefits management teams to re-establish culture, progress and momentum, where this has dwindled or is not meeting expectations.
- Align benefits management governance across your portfolio, programme(s) and project(s), to ensure consistent, appropriate, and timely reporting and decision making.
- Facilitate benefits-focused culture adoption workshops and behaviour embedding.
- Tailored coaching, training and mentoring of your teams in establishing a benefits management approach to investment and strategy execution. This can include subject awareness and capability, tools and technique training, or on-the-job shadowing.
- Fulfilling key roles or skill gaps in your benefits management organisation to help establish the discipline, or raise the maturity level of its execution.
- Benefits management health checks, to ascertain whether your investment and benefits realisation is where it is reported to be.
- Benefits review, to understand how your change investment is being managed, to provide insight and surety to key stakeholders.
Organisational Change
What is it?
Change is a constant in every successful organisation. Sometimes this is because a company is growing, sometimes a company needs to down-size and other times companies identify a need to restructure in order to better achieve their goals. While organisations generally understand the need to embrace change in order to achieve objectives and remain competitive, many struggle to manage all aspects of this change to ensure that initiatives are smoothly implemented, and that both individuals and the organisation are appropriately supported throughout. Managing the organisational change process is key to achieving the objectives of the change initiative, regardless of what the change entails.
Managed poorly, the process creates major problems for the culture, people and ultimately the entire operation. Managed well, it provides the platform for growth and success. There are several vital steps to consider, including:
- Being intentional about the changes you make
- Gaining the support of those in your organisation
- Communicating openly as much as possible
- Acknowledging the process of change
- Modelling a positive response to the organisational change
The consequences of poor or absent organisational change management must be avoided, and include:
- Inefficient investments in systems and instruments
- Unmotivated staff
- Retention problems
- Inefficient application of tasks and new processes
- Loss of management control over the organisation
- Stagnation and limitation in creativity and innovation
How can it benefit you?
The great benefit of Organisational Change Management is that it provides a solid strategy, process and framework for the people and organisation undergoing change. This framework is used to support and understand the change and its effect on the organisation and its people.
Benefits include:
- Ensuring the rationale for change is known before implementation which serves both as a motivator and an assessment of progress.
- Allowing the organisation to respond faster to customer demands.
- Helping to align existing resources within the organisation.
- Ensuring change can be implemented without negatively affecting the day to day operations.
- Allowing for organisational effectiveness and efficiency to be maintained or improved by acknowledging the concerns of staff.
- Reducing the time needed to implement change.
- Lowering the risks associated with change.
- Managing costs of change.
- Increasing return on investment.
- Creating an opportunity for the development of leadership, teams and best practice processes.
What Kanri offer
Kanri’s Business & Organisation Management team can assist you in many ways, including:
- Work with your senior management to understand your business and the changes ahead, then present an applicable way to introduce or further mature an organisational change management approach within your entire organisation, or for a specific department.
- Deliver an organisational change process or framework implementation, or a maturity uplift project/programme.
- Work with your existing organisational change management teams to re-establish culture, process and progress, where this has dwindled or is not meeting expectations.
- Align organisational change across your organisation.
- Tailored coaching, training and mentoring of your teams in establishing an organisational change management approach. This can include subject awareness and capability, tools and technique training, or on-the-job shadowing.
- Fulfilling key roles or skill gaps in your organisational change management team to help establish the discipline, or raise the maturity level of its execution.
- Organisational change management health checks, to ascertain whether your organisational change management methods and approach are as they are reported to be.
- Organisational change review, to understand how a change is being executed, to provide insight and surety to key stakeholders.
Auditing, Maturity Assessments & Growth
What is it?
Management maturity assessments and audits look across an organisation at how it delivers its change initiatives, such as those in projects, programmes and portfolio(s). They consider the whole system and not just the processes. A maturity assessment or audit can be tailored to meet the needs of an organisation and can be deployed in multiple ways, always with the goal of understanding the current maturity status, and optionally mapping out a journey to a future state, through a maturity uplift or improvement plan.
Seven perspectives are employed to perform any maturity audit:
- Organisational governance
- Management control
- Benefits management
- Risk management
- Stakeholder management
- Finance management
- Resource management
There are five maturity levels for each perspective:
- Level 1: awareness
- Level 2: repeatable
- Level 3: defined
- Level 4: managed
- Level 5: optimized
The audit allows an assessment of the process employed, the competencies of people, the tools deployed and the management information used to manage and deliver improvements. This allows organisations to determine their strengths and weaknesses in delivering change.
How can it benefit you?
Through baselining an organisation's performance it is possible to identify areas where an organisation can most effectively increase its project, programme and portfolio capability. Therefore the sort of benefits expected from using a structured maturity audit to develop and implement an uplift or improvement plan would be:
- Cost savings on delivering project outputs and programme outcomes.
- Cost Savings by integrate processes across an organisation.
- Cost savings by more effective use of investments.
- Improved benefits delivery.
- Improved quality of delivered projects and programmes.
- Improved customer satisfaction.
- Increase return on investment.
- Providing plans for continual progression.
- Recognising achievements from previous investment in capability improvement.
- Focusing on the organisation’s maturity, not specific initiatives (you can run good programmes and projects without having high levels of maturity – but not consistently).
What Kanri offer
Kanri’s Business & Organisation Management team can assist you in many ways, including:
- Performing organisational audits at project, programme or portfolio levels. It may be across all elements or only selected parts. The former gives a rounded picture of the organisation's capabilities and performance. Whereas focusing on any one of the individual perspectives that makes up the audit is relevant to tracking improvements in specific areas such as benefits management.
- A high-level assessment - this is appropriate for those wanting to know more about the maturity model and fuller audits, and understand how it works. It can be used to give an estimate of the organisations likely maturity level if a fuller assessment were undertaken.
- A shadow assessment - this is appropriate where an organisation wants a more robust estimate of its maturity, perhaps as part of an interim measure of progress. This sort of assessment is supported closer by a consultant to advise on how to gather input across an organisation, the sort of people to seek input from or provide challenge to assumptions and address optimism bias.
- Full diagnostic audit - these are appropriate when an organisation need a robust and independent assessment of its PPM capabilities as the baseline to improve its capabilities or as the basis for promoting its own capabilities.
- Deliver a maturity uplift or improvement plan.
- Work with your portfolio, programme, or project teams (or the PMO) to execute a maturity uplift or improvement plan.
- Tailored coaching, training and mentoring of your teams in performing maturity assessments and audits, as well as devising maturity uplift and improvement plans.
- Fulfilling key roles or skill gaps in your auditing teams to help establish the discipline, or raise the maturity level of its execution.
Tender Creation, Response, Fulfillment
What is it?
In today’s competitive business world, many potential projects and services are put out to tender. That is numerous potential companies are provided with the opportunity to bid for the work.
In their bids, they will describe how their company will solve a business problem, provide the service required or supply the goods requested. They will also need to provide a competitive price for this work.
The tender starts when an appropriate Invitation To Tender (ITT) has been identified. The ITT is a formal document that is published by a purchasing company in order to notify other companies that bids for a piece of work, project or service is required.
The process of designing and writing these ITTs by the purchasing company, creating a response with competitive pricing by the responding company, then the purchasing company negotiating and selecting a winner, is called tender management, proposal management or bid management.
As a company is competing against many other companies that may have the same or better qualities and lower prices, the art of tender management or writing a winning bid is highly skilled.
The same goes for the purchasing company. It is critically important that the ITT is well written and won’t be subject to misinterpretation by the many different responding companies. This ensures that they are able to accurately align their bid to the purchasing company’s real needs.
There is always a fixed deadline that the bids must be returned by and the decision made about which bidder to award the contract to. This makes end-to-end tender management very time dependent and it all adds to the stress of the entire process.
How can it benefit you?
The benefits of a properly managed tender lifecycle include:
- Full and proper analysis of the requirements within the ITT.
- Designed solution that meets these requirements.
- Structured and focussed management of the staff that will write the tender.
- A compelling proposal that meets the requirements and stands out from other bids.
- A pricing structure that will win the bid as well as produce a profit by the end of the project.
- Minimizing risk and maximizing the impact of the tender.
- Tight deadlines met.
- Effective negotiation strategy and execution.
Whilst there are processes and some computerised workflow systems that can assist with tender management, the approach is nowhere near as formalised as project management. This makes experienced ITT and proposal writers with a history of winning highly sought after.
What Kanri offer
Whether you are the purchasing company, or respond to ITTs, Kanri has experienced crew who can lead or compliment your teams on a successful journey.
Kanri’s Business & Organisation Management team can assist you in many ways, including:
- Work with your senior management to understand your business and present an applicable way to introduce or further mature a tender management approach within your entire organisation, or for a specific tender.
- Deliver a tender management implementation or maturity uplift project/programme.
- Work with your existing tender management teams to re-establish culture, process and progress, where this has dwindled or is not meeting expectations.
- Align tender management across your organisation.
- Tailored coaching, training and mentoring of your teams in establishing a tender management approach. This can include subject awareness and capability, tools and technique training, or on-the-job shadowing.
- Fulfilling key roles or skill gaps in your tender management team to help establish the discipline, or raise the maturity level of its execution.
- Tender management health checks, to ascertain whether your tender management methods and approach are as they are reported to be.
- Tender review, to understand how a tender is being executed, to provide insight and surety to key stakeholders.
- Negotiating with the other party to get the deal done.