Assuring project success for a major retail bank

"Pelicam ensured we resolved critical issues without which we would have been doomed to fail"
David Grange, Technology Programme Office

The Challenge

• Pelicam was engaged by a leading retail UK bank when the infrastructure division was seen to be suffering from a series of project delays and missed deliveries. This project was deemed too sensitive to fail.
• Pelicam was to undertake a project health check on a £15M mission critical infrastructure delivery project, during the start up phase of the project.

How We Helped

We worked collaboratively with the client to undertake our comprehensive Pelicam health check, based on our proprietary Project Intelligence Methodology.

The health check:

• ensures benefits and risks of a project are recognised, understood and deliverable
• provides early warning that problems and risks exist
• provides recommendations to fix or mitigate those problems or risks
• enables benchmarks against other projects
• and a sound ongoing, repeatable basis for evaluation of project health.

At a cost of less than 0.25% of the project budget, the health check was a small investment to secure the success of this business critical project.

Benefits Delivered

The completed health check identified a number of quick wins:

• project communications launched
• project scope tightened to ensure project deliverables and objectives were achievable
• tightening of project alignment to corporate strategy.

And identified areas that needed to be addressed to reduce immediate risk:

• owner for solution definition agreed to ensure solution integrity
• requirements defined more accurately to avoid scope creep
• governance process consolidated to ensure cross project dependencies understood
• recommendation that project intelligence needed to be built into the plans to ensure they would be both accurate and achievable

Pelicam worked with the client to ensure that correct remedies were applied, allowing the project to be set up correctly and with an excellent chance of success.

A benchmark analysis of project performance was plotted against the mean position of all Pelicam customers, which allowed progress to be monitored over time.

Following a successful presentation and acceptance of these recommendations, Pelicam was retained for an 18 month period to repeat the health check at key project stages.