Situation
Our client is one of the world’s leading manufacturers and marketers of prestige skin care, makeup, fragrance and hair care products. The company’s products are sold in over 150 countries and territories under a wide range of high-profile brand names.
The UK business has a portfolio of around 140 projects and programmes, all with increasing delivery complexity given inter-dependencies between projects, the client needed help with portfolio optimisation and the creation of a robustly sequenced delivery schedule. They also needed to understand the resources required in order to deliver these initiatives successfully to plan ahead and understand the true scale of investment.
Approach
Within very short timelines, Valcon identified and analysed all projects in the UK, across all brands and functions, which involved engaging over 150 stakeholders, 17 brands and eight business functions.
Valcon re-constructed their roadmap of projects that were to be delivered in-year (and outer years), identifying the ones that required investment and additional resource, and resequencing delivery schedules where they were mis-aligned having reviewing dependency profiles across the portfolio.
Valcon established a resource forecasting function, which looked at the skills mix, capabilities and where resources were located across the portfolio of projects. Valcon facilitated the categorisation and prioritisation of the portfolio, aligning importance of projects to the business’s strategy. And optimised the portfolio so that all projects and programmes would achieve their maximum value.
Results
Within accelerated timescales, Valcon provided clarity for the client to enable them to make informed investment decisions, and ensure money wasted by investing in the right projects at the wrong time.
This included developing a series of portfolio scenarios – with corresponding recommendations – that highlighted the pros and cons of each project and programme to the executive team. This included recommendations on which projects to stop, which to maintain and the ones that needed to be accelerated. This also included those projects that would be most beneficial to the UK business and deliver significant return on investment (ROI).
Our final deliverable was to build, from the ground-up, the UK businesses go-forward strategic portfolio plan, with detailed analysis of the resource required to support the successful delivery of their portfolio of projects across the business. This enabled the client to move forward with confidence and clarity.
