Programme/Project Management Assurance for Complex Relationships

We assure the business has excellent visibility of:

1. The business plan of outcomes you want to achieve and by when
2. The degree to which any complex project services/solutions are necessary to achieve your business outcomes
3. Where your existing supplier relationship and contract management process is already aligned to supporting your business outcomes, and where some realignment of it will generate further value for you
4. How your existing processes of procuring new strategic relationships, remediating and improving existing relationships and the exit and transition of relationships into new service/solution provision aligns with your business outcomes, and how any realignment of those processes will assure better fitness for purpose of those strategic relationships
5. The creation and updating of policies involving:
   • Roles and responsibilities between you and your strategic supplier, including individual internal job descriptions and OKRs
   • Operating governance
   • Relationship and contract management governance (to assure the supplier’s ‘Expert Responsibilities’ are not inadvertently diluted and undermine your contractual protection)
   • Your competency framework for the Intelligent Client Function Team, including the interdependent elements of cross-functional roles and responsibilities
   • Team capability building including training, coaching and mentoring aligned to agreed business outcomes
   • Overall process modelling aligned to the ‘Future State’ (target operating model)

We assure effective management of the mobilisation and implementation of the Programme/Project(s), and ensure that the following are achieved:

1. Strategic goals. The implementation has enabled the organisation to achieve its overall strategic objectives and goals from the Programme/Project.
2. Benefits focus. The Programme/Project was managed in a focused and optimised manner, such that the key strategic benefits were realised on time and to budget.
3. Complex interdependencies simplified. The complex interdependencies between the various Programme and Project initiatives and tasks were robustly monitored to accelerate early benefits being delivered across the board.
4. Effective risk mitigation. Having an end-to-end integrated team has helped you reduce material risks in the Programme/Project quickly and/or very effective workarounds have been implemented.
5. Optimised resource management. You’ve prioritised key activities aligned to the most important business objectives, thus enabling you to reduce conflicts in demand between key resources and reallocate to different projects accordingly.  

We deliver the coordinated organisation, direction and implementation of a range of specific initiatives that aim to achieve outcomes and realise benefits in strategic supplier relationships.

The Programmes we support are defined as a temporary, flexible organisation created to coordinate, direct and oversee the implementation of a set of related projects and activities in order to deliver the outcomes and benefits related to your organisation’s strategic supplier initiatives. We structure and deliver:

1. Governance. These are the functions, processes and procedures that define how your Programme is set up, managed and controlled. It usually involves following a process based methodology, for example Managing Successful Programmes (MSP).
2. Business case. The Programme business case must address the greater uncertainty that exists in the Programme environment. We ensure it provides justification for the Programme based on measurable benefits and is kept up to date, showing approved changes. The business case generally provides information on:
   • the background of the Programme and why it is needed
   • what options have been considered and which one has been chosen (including the ‘do nothing’ option)
   • the expected benefits and disbenefits
   • the costs, investment appraisal and funding arrangements
   • the risks and impact on the business case
   • a summary of the delivery of the outputs and benefits.
3. Roles and responsibilities. We assure clarity of where the roles and responsibilities lie with regard to offering advice and in decision making.
4. Benefits realisation. We provide a benefits realisation plan that helps keep track of what needs to be done, when and by whom, to manage the realisation of benefits. The plan may include information on:
   • activities and milestones from benefit profiles
   • reporting milestones to Programme/Project board and post-project governance structures
   • summary review of benefit profiles
   • post project review.
5. Risk register. We provide a register that addresses risks that are likely to have a wider business impact if they occur. We’ll also include key risks that cannot be managed within any of the individual projects within the programme; common risks within any specific project that, if combined, would have an impact at Programme level and risks arising at the Programme level.
6. Planning. We assure the Programme has an overall plan at a higher level of detail than the project plan. This will highlight dependencies between projects, plus project and resource dependencies and, at the delivery level, it records the key milestones, such as deliverables or decision points. The plan will also detail assurance activities, for example, a Starting Gate or Gateway Review. As a minimum, the content of our robust Programme plans would usually include:
   • tranche objectives, start and end dates
   • projects with their duration, key milestones and dates
   • other activities and their duration, including benefits and realisation activities
   • dependencies between projects
   • indication of what human and other resources are needed for the successful completion of each project or activity
   • any major reviews – e.g. Gateway Review.
7. Resource management. The on-going planning of resources is vital to assure access to the skills and experience needed to deliver the Programme. We address resource planning, giving consideration to a variety of resourcing solutions and allowing for the ability to factor in recruitment timetables and procedures as required.
8. Stakeholders. We ensure their level of interest and influence is documented to allow for planned communication and also devise a Programme communication plan which coordinates and aligns with project communications and deals with matters out of the scope of individual projects that are part of the Programme.
9. Closure. We document a record of the Programme’s achievements, as well as to capture any lessons learned for future Programmes. It may contain the following:
   • an outline of how much of the Blueprint has been implemented
   • a list of the benefit measures that have been captured to show how well the business case has been achieved
   • a list of who is the new owner of the benefit realisation activities and whether or not this responsibility has been formally handed over and accepted
   • a list of all outstanding risks and issues and where the ownership now lies.
10. Lessons learned. We factor into the Programme plan the opportunity to record lessons learned and encourage the project teams to participate.

We make sure that project management excellence goes beyond producing project charters, detailed schedules and attractive status reports. Factors such as downsizing, mergers, restricted finances, an accelerated business pace, rising competition and seemingly ceaseless change, acting singly and in concert, demand much more.

We will manage time, costs, quality, scope, risks and other traditional practices, as these are a vital foundation of good project management. However, to achieve excellence and maximum value, there are some additional key competencies we make sure our integrated team have in place:

1. Negotiation: Negotiation is a vital part of successful project delivery. Irrespective of the stakeholders we are dealing with (suppliers, managing employees or contractors), we are negotiating. The quality and success of your project can be directly affected by the ability (or inability) to negotiate.
2. Marketing: We assure that the evidence of value for money of the project we are engaged on stands up to independent scrutiny. In turn, that it should sustain itself against competing initiatives that jostle for higher priorities, management’s attention and valuable resources.
3. Benefits visibility: Our project managers continually put the benefits of the project onto the radars of senior management. If we do not, you may soon find projects failing because of a lack of senior management support.
4. Customer Service: We are paranoid about excellent customer service and that your senior stakeholders have evidence of the great service levels being provided. Great customer service keeps your customers happy, satisfied and loyal.
5. Management of senior stakeholders: We employ good management strategies of senior stakeholders. In return, their support, guidance, mentoring and influence of your project will be your reward.
6. Nurturing Staff: We make sure appropriate processes and methods are employed so that your teams on the project feel confident they are being supported well.
7. Accounting: We assure that your project appropriately deals with the interdependencies within your accounting department. It needs to account for consuming financial, staff and equipment resources while understanding how project results contribute to the interrelated components of financial statements such as bottom-line profits, revenue generation, expense reduction and increased cash flows.
8. Ethics: Ethical dilemmas are often most severe in projects involving complex supplier services/solutions. We’ll implement appropriate methods to ensure commercial trust and ethics are inherent within the project. Ethics fuel and support the vital element of trust with team members, clients, suppliers and other stakeholders.
9. Culture: Organisational culture consists of shared beliefs and values which produce an operating equilibrium for your team’s behaviour. Whilst we can’t influence your own organisation’s culture, we can and do influence the culture between you and your strategic supplier and how it can be aligned to fuel high performance.
10. Stress Management: Shouldering the pressures of complex, high commercial risk/dependency, fast-paced initiatives can send stress levels to new heights. We’ll assure these are kept to a minimum.
11. Innovation: Creativity and innovation are the life blood of complex initiatives. The BPG Optimise process endows projects with enhanced performance and success by allowing the team to eliminate obstacles and hurdle barriers.
12. Managing Change: Change (and paying your taxes) are the only certainties in life. Complex supplier relationships have a series of realities. The BPG Optimise process prevents and mitigates troublesome and costly consequences, by fostering change to initiate and maintain worthy initiatives as part of the day to day governance.

Successfully managing the Programme of work across complex supplier relationships will support your organisation to achieve great outcomes, quickly. Evidence from more than 500 complex supplier relationships indicates there are 10 key behaviours great Programme management should achieve. These include: 

1. Objectives being met. Your suppliers across the Programme are helping you to achieve your project objectives consistently, which in turn, means this is enabling you to achieve your business outcomes.
2. Critical friend supplier. Your strategic supplier is both supporting and challenging you to work with them strategically to achieve on-going maximum value.
3. Inherent commercial trust and good ethics. Both you and your supplier operate to high professional ethical and personal moral standards. In turn, the supplier delivering services to a high consistent standard, builds commercial trust between everyone.
4. Sustained collaboration and innovation. You govern the relationship in a highly collaborative manner, that results in great innovation between you to optimise critical service delivery and streamline complex project solutions.
5. Reduced service cost. Sustained collaboration and innovation in service delivery is driving significantly reduced costs for BAU services.
6. High reputation with your peers. The ability to drive on-going service innovation and reduced BAU costs greatly increases your reputation with your executive peers.
7. Internal team aligned. Truly collaborative operating governance means your internal senior stakeholders are all aligned as to the outcomes they are achieving from the relationship.
8. Services always aligned to outcomes. Having a 6 monthly re-shaping process to check that business objectives and outcomes are still current and where they are not, to re-state/re-generate them, and then adjusting services/solutions to meet these updated objectives and outcomes, means your expectations are being sense checked and service re-aligned to meet these changing expectations. 
9. Flexible/agile contract structure. As part of reshaping/realigning services, the contract terms and schedules allow for reshaping of the supplier’s delivery of services and solutions, based on a value for money assessment at each reshaping cycle. 
10. Evidenced based results. Firstly, that the KPIs you have in place reflect the real value your organisation is achieving from the strategic supplier relationship you have in place. Secondly, that your process of validating performance, service/solution cost and ROI data means that it will stand up to independent scrutiny so that senior executives on both client and supplier side can rely on that data for improving performance on an on-going basis.

The BPG Optimise Method has eight principle foundations that will help you achieve successful management of your strategic supplier relationship. These include :  

1. An Articulated Business Vision. The organisation has clearly articulated specific business objectives it will achieve once the service/solution has been implemented.
2. An Intelligent Client Function (ICF). An ICF team that demonstrates strategic, commercial and partnership behaviours an Intelligent Supplier expects.
3. An Intelligent Supplier. A supplier that understands the ‘holistic’ objectives of an Intelligent Client and strategically supports them.
4. Clear Service Delivery Requirements. Clear articulation of the ‘use cases’ and business objectives the client is seeking from the supplier and its solution to enable for it.
5. Supplier Expert Responsibilities. Clarity of an Expert Supplier’s “Duty to Warn” and how that impacts the pre-contractual due diligence responsibilities between the client and the supplier.
6. Fit-For-Purpose Contract. Contract terms that are reverse engineered from the business objectives, to support ‘enabling’ behaviours.
7. Buying Governance. Procurement governance that drives the right foundations to assure a fit- for-purpose solution/supplier is procured.
8. Relationship and Contract Management. Strategic Relationship and Contract Management that assures on-going benefits are realised for the life cycle of the relationship.

Aligned to your specific business outcomes, your team should have the most appropriate strategic supplier management skills that are required to ensure your management of the Programme to achieve successful outcomes, quickly. The key internal team skills you should have in place to assure the most effective collaboration from your strategic suppliers are:

1. Thought Leadership & Strategy. Team members that are effective at establishing and forecasting the strategic supplier services/solutions available to support your own organisation’s effectiveness in serving its clients and the team’s ability to plan, implement and mobilise that strategy.
2. Innovation/Service Re-Shaping. Exemplar governance processes in place that capture changing organisational objectives and outcomes, good existing operating practice, where existing operating practice needs to be realigned to drive better value and the process of updating written contracts and schedules so they continue to align to (a) the changing business objectives and outcomes and (b) the supplier services/solutions being delivered.
3. Commercial Trust and Ethics. An excellent degree of Trust and Ethics from both the supplier’s and your own team that are used as foundations to deliver great services/solutions to the agreed outcomes, on time and to budget.
4. Fit-for-Purpose Contracting Skills. Successful Programme/project management is much faster if contractual structures are in place that drive ‘enabling’ and ‘innovative’ behaviours between client and supplier. It allows on-going maximum value to be derived over the lifetime of the relationship. 
5. Expert Supplier Responsibilities. A foundation that is often missed in Programme/project management is the degree to which the client team understands the supplier’s “Expert Responsibilities”, implied by recent case law. A good implementation of these responsibilities incorporated into the requirements definition, procurement, contracting, project management, operating and performance optimisation process will mean the Programme/project management will accelerate the service/solution achieving your business objectives. 
6. Commercial Negotiation Skills. Your internal team having deep domain expertise in leveraging and optimising ‘Interest Based’ negotiation skills to drive maximum value between client and supplier on a win-win basis.
7. Buying Governance. Programme / project management of getting into new strategic relationships is better assured when procurement processes are in place that starts with the ‘end in mind’, ie. how the procurement process will operate a due diligence process that can safely assure a suitable fit for purpose service/solution is likely to be implemented on time and within budget. This type of thinking aligns very well with successful Programme management principles for complex supplier relationships. 
8. Objectives/Process Alignment. It’s important that the Programme team has extensive knowledge of (a) the key objectives the organisation is aiming to achieve and by when, (b) the governance process of identifying changing market forces and which client objectives need to be realigned, as a result, (c) what operational processes and supplier services/solutions need to adapt to meet the changing objectives and (d) the governance and contractual documentation that will need to be amended in the event of objectives and supplier service / solution changes. 

We’ll review the performance data, cost information and return on investment you hold for your strategic suppliers and determine, against our internal reference framework based on over 500 complex / strategic supplier relationships, which data stands up to robust independent scrutiny and which data is more subjective. Within the context of the available data we assess its relevance, accuracy, timeliness and punctuality, accessibility and clarity, comparability, coherence and completeness.