The client's most important project partnership was incurring excessive penalties with every project and the company was losing money. Engaged to analyze the issues, fix the problems, and smooth the partner relationship, I employed a 5-pronged services approach:

 

• Business Process Analysis & Documentation

• Stakeholder and Team Engagement

• Business Process Transformation

• Build a PMO from the Ground Up

• Training

 

Within 1 year of beginning the initiative, the partnership relationship was restored, projects ran smoothly and without penalty using a repeatable project framework, and the channel went from a loss in revenue to a $2M profit before the end of the year.

 

Portfolio Management

The client's portfolio of projects, business cases and initiatives were unmanageable and uncontrolled. Working with a team of senior resources, across several lines of business, we developed a project submission, initiation, prioritization, and selection process that met the needs of everyone involved. In addition to selecting projects to proceed, several gates were introduced to keep good projects on track and shut down poor performing projects early.

 

This process served as a blueprint for a follow-up project which was to implement a software driven Enterprise Project Management (EPM) environment.

 

The completed project allowed stakeholders across the business to review the pipeline, see in progress projects and their real-time statuses, as well as allow executive and senior management to make timely decisions.

Agile Ramp-up & Training

The client wanted to transition from using a traditional software development life cycle to an agile one. There was little expertise within the group and a relunctance to change from a known and comfortable method.

 

Jumping in as the scrum master within a scrum team, I worked directly with the product owner to build a proper, prioritized backlog and ran the sprint cycles with the scrum team that was distributed across India, Mexico and the US.

 

I developed and delivered a training package that was specific to the organization's product roadmap and team structure. The training was delivered both in person and via WebEx.

 

After a couple of months of actively running the sprints, the agile process became second nature and the organization was using agile with ease and competence.