Project Services Many organisations struggle with inconsistent or poor project management performance across their business. Sometimes the failure to deliver on time and on budget (or at all!) is simply an issue of capability or methodology. At other times, there can be multiple complex reasons for the failure. Determining those reasons often requires an objective outsider to analyse the situation and develop solutions. In addition, it s challenging to govern large portfolios of projects, even successful projects, due to the complexities of project interdependencies and business impacts. Effective governance can prevent delivery problems and improve stakeholder satisfaction. Terra Firma can help you with all levels of project activity, leveraging the deep expertise we have across a wide range of industries and organisation types. Whether you need an entire program managed, or you want to improve your own internal capability, we can help. How do we do it? Terra Firma consultants possess solid project experience in PMBOK, PRINCE2, Agile Scrum, and many proprietary delivery methodologies, and can set up your large programs or individual projects for success. We focus on both the completion of project activities and on successful transition to business as usual state for truly sustainable change. Our priority is your success both at the completion of the project and continuing into the future. We can coach your project managers at all levels, and provide independent advice in existing project steering committees or organisational change control boards. At Terra Firma we also perform health checks and project recovery services when you need to assess or adjust the governance or business intelligence you are getting in your project portfolio.
The Terra Firma Project Services include: Project and Program Delivery We can project manage the entire iterative or traditional delivery project lifecycle, or manage critical elements of an existing program of work or project. Master Scheduling Master scheduling is a complex discipline of production planning, resource planning, capacity planning, and managing interlocking dependencies. Our experienced schedulers can help you develop and successfully manage complex integrated portfolio, program and project schedules. Vendor Management Terra Firma s consultants have proven skills and expertise in vendor management services encompassing the procurement and delivery phases. We can tailor our service to your needs. If you are already struggling with a vendor management issue, it s not too late to get some help. Project Services Coaching Project, Program and Portfolio Management Offices We can set up and run project, program or portfolio management offices for you. Alternatively, using industry standard capability assessment tools, we can help you assess and improve your portfolio, program, project management organisational capability. We can also customise a standard methodology to work with your financial, procurement and human resource management existing processes. Project and Program Health Checks and Assurance We can provide project or program health check services, or deliver independent quality assurance and probity within your existing governance structures. This could include being an independent project steering committee member or sitting as an independent member on your portfolio management committees. We can work with your project staff to help set up initial plans, processes and reporting procedures and attend on a regular checkpoint basis to ensure everything is going to plan.
Project and Program Delivery Project and program delivery are now standard activities for any organisation, due largely to the pace of technological change in business. Unfortunately, it takes time to develop the internal capability to run those activities. Many organisations start projects, but can find it difficult to complete them. Good quality project and program management can produce significant benefits in cost reduction, improved efficiency, growth in staff skillsets, and increased competitiveness in the market. These benefits in turn improve stakeholder and shareholder satisfaction, increase staff morale, and positively influence acceptance of future change. When the change is transformational, the benefits of superior management and delivery can reach far into the future, and create new and unforeseen opportunities. At Terra Firma, our firm foundation in project and program delivery and focus on your priorities means we can plan and deliver project and program activity for maximum success. How do we do it? At Terra Firma we have a talented group of project and program managers trained and certified in a wide range of traditional and iterative project delivery approaches, as well as PMBOK, PRINCE2 and Agile Scrum. Whether it is project managing a complex business modernisation or transformation, or a new online method of communicating with your customers, we know how to lead or work alongside your team to deliver the benefits. Our consultants have implemented business and system transformations, organisational and business process change initiatives and complex system upgrades across government and commercial industries including large ICT, financial services and utility customers. Their experience means they can guide your activity and your people to the extent you require, setting you up for success and providing a sustainable result.
The Terra Firma Project and Program Delivery Services include: Your Approach/Methodology We can provide individual project and program managers, project management officers, coordinators and master schedulers, with skills in PMBOK, PRINCE2 and Agile Scrum, as well as experience in many of our clients proprietary delivery methodologies. We work alongside your project staff, managing teams of local or remote vendor or client business analysts and organisational change and knowledge management consultants to deliver business outcomes. Delivery: Initiation to Closure In the initiation and planning stages of your project, we will work with you to brief the team, implement agreed governance procedures and develop the project plan; where appropriate identifying milestones and the critical path or agile sprints. During execution we can manage changing requirements to deliver reliable results by controlling and monitoring the delivery process. To ensure your project successfully transitions into business as usual, we will make sure your project closure and handover procedures are fully complied with. If you don t have a standard close-out process, we can help you develop one so that all projects cover off the necessary postproject checks and engagement. Sensitive Stakeholder/Issue and Risk Management Terra Firma will work with you to understand who the key stakeholders are, their expectations, and any challenges to meeting those expectations. We will help you meet your stakeholder requirements and provide critical reporting of relevant metrics on a regular basis. If necessary we can help you deal with issues or mitigate new risks before they become issues, and apply best practice to inspect, adapt and revise the plan to stay on course. Managing the Change We will work with you to identify the process and business changes that will occur. We will help you engage with stakeholders to get those changes onto the wider corporate change radar. As well as being able to supply experienced change managers, our project managers are trained in basic organisational change theory to maximise the appropriate and effective handling of change. Focus on the Benefits It s pointless embarking on a project if you can t articulate measurable project benefits. Realising those benefits and demonstrating return on investment to the stakeholders is critical. Terra Firma project managers work with your portfolio team to prepare an initial benefits realisation plan, benchmark the key performance metrics and then conduct a comparative analysis at completion to determine the benefits realised.
Master Scheduling Master scheduling is an established discipline that encompasses production, resource and capacity planning and management. In an increasingly complex business environment, where internal and external dependencies exist for all programs of work, master scheduling is a critical ingredient for successfully managing resourcing and capacity issues in business and IT project planning. Master scheduling includes the management of interlocking dependencies between other in-flight programs, projects or business-as-usual activities. This has the power to give you essential information for managing the dynamic lifecycle of your project, staying on top of the issues keeping your stakeholders awake at night, and avoiding those surprise issues that can come out of other parts of your business. Terra Firma has consultants with in-depth project and resource management experience, giving us the capability to deliver master scheduling services within various methodologies using a number of toolsets. How do we do it? Our experienced master schedulers will identify the critical path in the development of the master schedule, and analyse the progress of the overall schedule on the critical path. Their work provides superior visibility and accurate reporting of integrated timelines, costing and resource information, and identifies risks of deviation. The greatest benefit to your business is the reduction of risk across your business initiatives by providing a clear view of activities. We will work with your team to develop and successfully manage complex integrated schedules from inception of the project, through the various phases to completion and benefits realisation.
The Terra Firma Master Scheduling Services include: Planning Our master schedulers have sound knowledge and experience in PMBOK, PRINCE2 and many of our clients proprietary delivery methodologies, including Telstra s TDP and NAB s PiTN. We can facilitate initial planning of the work, capturing the full agreed scope from concept through delivery to realising the benefits. We ll use industry best practice: Work Breakdown (WBS) or Product Breakdown Structures (PBS), including mapping to Cost Work Breakdown Structures (CWBS) as required. Scheduling Once the WBS, PBS or CWBS has been established, our schedulers will develop these into detailed schedules using the tools that your organisation employs (e.g. Microsoft Project, Primavera or Open Plan Professional). Our schedulers can include full resourcing and costing information for each element of the WBS, which will inform resource management, project billing or invoice reconciliation in earned value projects. We will identify all dependencies and ensure the team remains focused and aware of the downstream dependencies and make schedule allowances for any risks, issues and constraints identified. Status Tracking and Reporting Our experienced schedulers set up, run and manage integrated processes and procedures that collect and report progress against agreed (baselined) schedules at both detailed and management levels. This is critical to minimising risk and having confidence that the project can stay on track. Independent Project Schedule Health Checks We can provide independent quality assurance of your existing project or program schedules based on a rigorous set of quality criteria developed by Terra Firma. Based on industry best practice and scheduling standards, we can report on how your organisation s schedules adhere to standards and quality criteria, and identify strategies for improvement, ensuring accuracy and confidence in the performance of your portfolios.
Vendor Management Buying technology and related services and engaging vendors to deliver these is increasingly complex. Understanding exactly what you are signing up for and where the risk and accountability lies is just as critical to achieving full value as the product itself. This means that managing your partnership with vendors is paramount in achieving the benefits and outcomes associated with your investments. Crucially, this must also happen beyond the procurement and contract phases, through and past the delivery date, as you manage delivery, quality and warranty on the products. The risks of not closely managing your vendors include extra charges for additional work you believed was covered by the contract, timeline blowouts due to time or financial extensions resulting from unclear requirements, unmanageable vendor expectations or, worse still, contractual penalties paid to the vendor. Terra Firma understands the complexities inherent in these relationships, and can help you set clear expectations with your vendor, clearly articulating where accountability lies. We can support this with our expertise in earned value management, a sophisticated technique widely used to measure project performance and progress by integrating measurements of scope, schedule and cost. How do we do it? Terra Firma s consultants have proven skills and expertise in vendor management services encompassing the procurement and delivery phases, including: procurement management and market testing: request for information (RFI), requests for quotations, proposals or tenders (RFQ, RFP, RFT) contract management: reviews and change control ongoing vendor management services including vendor risk and quality management, change/variation management, and payment processes including earned value and dispute resolution. Terra Firma will tailor the service to meet your business need through a process of discovery and clarification in partnership with your people. If you are already struggling with a vendor management issue, it s not too late to get some help.
The Terra Firma Vendor Management Services include: Procurement management Terra Firma can help you identify and assess relevant procurement processes from panels, selected vendors or the open market (e.g. RFI, RFQ, RFP, RFT). We have the expertise to develop selection criteria, and manage the vendor evaluation process. We can even prepare go to market documents using your organisation s procurement standards. We can also issue the documents to the market on your behalf (confidentially if required). Contract management Terra Firma understands that a healthy relationship with a vendor can make it easier to manage issues. To this end, we work to develop a shared understanding of roles and responsibilities, performance clauses and expectations. During the contracting phase, we ll make sure agreed KPIs, effective governance and sound contract performance management review processes are included. We will monitor compliance to your standards and improve your position by remediating non-conformance and non-compliance to your policies and procedures. Ongoing vendor management services Ongoing vendor management for projects and programs includes managing vendor performance and delivery following contract execution. We can take care of vendor invoicing, interfacing into your organisation s purchasing and accounts payable procedures, budget forecasting and records keeping, and ensure that project reports reflect accurate vendor costs and forecasts. We understand, however, that variations cannot always be foreseen and can have significant impact on budgets and forecasts. We ll ensure that when they do happen, vendors implement and follow change control processes and perform rigorous analysis and traceability. Terra Firma will ensure the acceptance criteria is specified and agreed on for the deliverables to mitigate any risks. We promote openness and accessibility by using relevant repositories you may have such as SharePoint and Codebase and will track and trace the signing and acceptance of all your project deliverables.
Project Services Coaching Your people know your business best, so it can make sense to have these subject matter experts managing traditional or agile projects. They know what needs to be delivered and who to talk to, and they can hit the ground running. It can be effective in reducing costs but in reality, often it is not possible to manage and control projects effectively in tandem with a business as usual job. Your people face a range of competing pressures in implementing new projects. They may need to manage competing organisational priorities, and balance both business as usual activities and the project with limited financial and human resources. Internal project managers may also encounter complex stakeholder issues, where existing relationships can create assumptions and difficult situations. At Terra Firma we believe that your people can deliver even more effectively than they are now, with a little support from an objective, experienced specialist to ignite their potential. All they need is the right development to take them to the next level. Terra Firma can provide them with tools and techniques to deliver successfully, and the support to apply these in their workplace. How do we do it? Terra Firma can support individual project managers or full project management teams across a broad range of industries, and across different project methogologies, to improve your organisation s project delivery capability. New or inexperienced project managers can be coached to quickly bring them up to speed. Experienced project managers can draw on a wealth of Terra Firma technique resources and use Terra Firma as a sounding board for critical project decision making. Terra Firma provide an expert project management or scrum master professional to mentor and coach your individiual resources at the project commencement and then on an as agreed part time basis through delivery and project closure. 03/2003
The Terra Firma Project Coaching Services include: Individual Traditional or Agile Project Coaching Whether for an aspiring project manager or experienced program manager, Terra Firma can provide coaching to raise your people s skills to the next level. All coaching services are designed according to the individual s needs and the unique environment in which they are operating. Methodology Coaching Terra Firma can provide coaching on the fundamentals of traditional or agile project management, turning theory into action and building organisational project capability: providing tools and techniques to ensure project management knowledge is effectively applied to real project situations helping with the development of processes within the initiation, planning, execution, controlling and closure of a project, and helping project managers meet the expectations of project delivery without over-committing or over-delivering at the expense of time, cost and resource. Senior Talent Coaching Many aspects of effective project, program and portfolio management are not covered by a methodology. The most successful people know how to manage the subtler aspects of complex situations, such as spheres of influence, issues management, dealing with vendors, and engaging very senior stakeholders. Terra Firma can help your senior project; program and portfolio people recognise, understand and influence these factors. We pair your project, program or portfolio manager with a Terra Firma project management professional, who will build on your people s strengths and provide valuable insights and tools for maximising their effectiveness and achieving the results you need. We will work with your project manager on an agreed time basis per week. Team Project Manager Mentoring and Peer Level Support If your teams need a sounding board or mentor, Terra Firma can provide a structured mentoring or peer level support program that allows them to engage with an experienced Terra Firma project professional. As a team, they ll discuss project concepts, challenges and ideas as well as considering appropriate professional development objectives. This can be provided on an agreed basis dependent on your organisation s needs. 03/2003
Project, Program, and Portfolio Management Offices Like many organisations, your business may have a large investment portfolio in business change and technology change projects or programs. The project investment portfolio can include projects or programs running over a number of years and spanning mutiple parts of the business. Projects are easily initiated; governing a portfolio of them is much harder, requiring both agility and rigorous management. You must ensure they are adequately resourced, deal with issues, manage complex financial requirements, and recognise the downstream effects of the issues in one project on another. As the project investment portfolio grows, it can become increasingly difficult to manage the risks associated with large portfolio management. Terra Firma s proven expertise can help you with effective decision management, allowing you to better balance the complex and interdependent considerations that exist across a program or portfolio. How do we do it? At Terra Firma we have a talented group of project and program managers and assessors familiar with various project, program or portfolio assessment methodologies that put you in charge of your investments. With these tools, you will be able to get focus and control over portfolio concerns, as well as recognise, reward and repeat excellence in project behaviours, growing your internal capability. During these engagements we work with you to understand your concerns, then partner with the project, program or portfolio management and business management teams to identify internal excellence, areas for improvement, and better practices to implement. In addition, we can use industry standard capability assessment tools to help you assess your portfolio, program, project (P3) management organisational capability. Our recommendations can help you establish a project, program or portfolio management office and improve your organisation s delivery capability.
The Terra Firma Project Program Portfolio management office Services include: Project, Program, Portfolio (P3) Management Office Assessments At Terra Firma we know how to make successful project processes repeatable. We can assess your organisation s performance using standard industry tools. With these, we ll assess the following perspectives, valid for each level of management (project program or portfolio): management control benefits management financial management stakeholder engagement resource management risk management, and governance. We report for each perspective against a maturity level (from awareness of process through to defined, managed or optimised processes being followed ) and recommend areas for improvement. Project Management Office Setup Terra Firma has extensive experience in establishing project management offices and setting up project management procedures. At Terra Firma we can work with your people to assess how well the management controls are documented, understood and adhered to across the portfolio. We can also determine, whether initiatives are clearly defined, outputs described and blueprints identified for transitioning to business as usual operations. Program Management Office Setup Managing multiple projects to deliver a business benefit or improvement requires enhanced scheduling and governance capabilities. Often multiple vendors and resources from across different components of your organisation need to be brought together in a program of multiple projects. Terra Firma can set up the initial program office procedures, and recommend and establish a governance structure for the life of the program of work. Portfolio Management Office Setup We can provide independent portfolio management and reporting services. By implementing competent portfolio reporting and governance practices, internal project managers who struggle with reporting or delivery can be mentored in project management better practice. Terra Firma can work with you to customise a standard methodology to work in your specific environment, with all the relevant financial, procurement and human resource management existing processes. We can then train and report on its adoption across your organisation.
Project and Program Health Checks and Assurance Projects are expensive and like every other cost in your business, return on investment is paramount. You want to be confident your projects will produce the outcomes you want and expect, on time and within budget. Program and project assurance is therefore critical, but it is complex, especially on IT and infrastructure projects. You need oversight by people that understand project lifecycles as well as business environments and stakeholder interests, who can judge when to act on risks and can bring in relevant specialist opinion when required. Equally, they should be able to recognise the strengths in your activities in other words, identify what is working well, and where that proficiency can be leveraged across your other project activities. Terra Firma can help you do all of this. We have solid experience in providing independent quality assurance and project health check services, on either a one-off or ongoing basis. We can support your senior management and delivery teams, helping them articulate their concerns and identify root causes and resolution options. How do we do it? Terra Firma has senior, experienced consultants with significant business and IT governance experience. We can: perform an independent project (or program) point-in-time health check of an in-flight project and incorporate findings and recommendations in our health check report or provide ongoing independent assurance services by functioning as an independent steering committee member or advisor, particularly for non-technology sponsors and steering committees serving on technology projects. Our independent review of your projects and ongoing assurance services will provide regulators and executive management with assurances that your projects are being transparent. It will also reinforce the need for quality project documentation and timely reporting.
The Terra Firma Project Assurance Services include: Project Health Checks Terra Firma has a standard project health check method we use to assess and report on the health of an existing project. We can investigate specific concerns or provide a general health check. Our general health check will report on how well the project is: engaging its stakeholders; customers, suppliers, third parties and management managing business/project requirements, iterations and change requests managing and reporting against the schedule and work breakdown structure (WBS) or agile sprint plan using and managing project and organisational resources managing and reporting project costs, quality, risk and issues managing procurement, vendors, payments and earned value. During our health check process we work with the project team to identify where they are doing well and what areas they know they can improve. We then sensitively report on any issues preventing the best possible outcome being achieved and include recommendations for good governance or practices that the project would benefit from implementing, within the context of your methodology. Ongoing Assurance Services Project and business pressures can sometimes result in governance behaviours that do not best serve your business. In addition, non-technology project sponsors and steering committee members can find it difficult to navigate the complex and unfamiliar waters of technology projects. Anticipating issues and recognising alternative courses of action is almost impossible without assistance from experts who have prior experience in technology programs of work. Terra Firma consultants can help your project sponsors and steering committee members ask the right questions to bring out all the information they need to make sound decisions. We use the benefit of our experience on other projects to guide your governing bodies on delving deeper into areas where issues might be developing. We can also sit on your steering committee as an independent member, reviewing the same steering committee papers as all members, and using our project management experience to assess reported progress. In this role, we review proposed options being recommended by your projects against our knowledge of various project methods, techniques and options, and can comment and provide independent advice to the steering committee members.