Situation
As a leading global speciality insurer and reinsurer, one of our client’s strategic aims was the delivery of Nexus, a programme to leverage new data and reporting tools to help develop lean business processes to make better underwriting and operational decisions. Ultimately, this initiative would help the client adapt more quickly to changing market opportunities.
Nexus was also key to our clients integration following a recent acquisition – to support the delivery of improved business performance and enable scalable, profitable growth. Working for the programme director, Valcon was brought in to provide project management office (PMO) support to the programme, as well as help the programme director regain executives’ confidence in PMO as a function that could add business value.
Approach
Once on the ground, Valcon conducted a PMO maturity assessment of the existing PMO. This reviewed all areas of the Nexus PMO, with a focus on governance, planning, reporting and status reporting. Valcon worked closely with stakeholders from all of the four key workstreams – Design and Build, Testing, Cutover and Business Change – and provided mentoring to incumbent PMO staff members.
Results
Confidence in the PMO team was improved both within the programme community and among senior MS Amlin stakeholders. This was largely driven by robust management information and improvements in reporting, including the standardisation of regular reporting and avoidance of data cleansing as part of the production of board reports and steering committee papers.
The capabilities of longer term PMO employees was improved and enhanced through mentoring and coaching them in ‘best practice’ PMO skills and methodologies.
The planning process was put under greater control to enable milestone changes to be tracked, using an effective change control mechanism. Costs were considerably reduced by using a streamlined PMO with deep expertise, but without ‘Big Four’ operating costs.
