Principality Building Society

The Principality Building Society, the UK's seventh largest building society, operating at the heart of Wales for the past 150 years, recently engaged CMC Partnership to review the efficiency and effectiveness of its Programme Management Office (PMO). The PMO is responsible for the co-ordinated delivery of high-value business changes, providing the critical link between Principality’s business change and IT functions.

Working within a two-week timeframe, CMC Partnership designed a healthcheck data collection model, providing a detailed assessment of over 200 criteria within eight critical operational PMO processes:

Governance
Quality management
Stakeholder management and communications
Risk management
Planning and resourcing
Progress tracking, reporting
Budget management
PMO structure and performance.

Using formal and informal interviewing techniques, CMC met with leaders and business change stakeholders from across all business units, conducting some 20 interviews in total. The delivered business benefits of a sample set of critical projects were assessed alongside the efficiency of the collaboration between the business change and IT functions.

Four principal recommendations were made following the analysis:

Improve the interaction between programme/projects and the IT group by reviewing the expectations of all parties, ensuring full transparency and sharing of resources where possible.
Develop and maintain a programme-level plan (“programme on a page”), where changes require re-authorisation.
Strengthen the role of Business Manager by adopting some of the practices associated with the Business Change Manager role in the Office of Government Commerce’s (OGC) Programme Management guidelines.
Ensure that governance arrangements are reinforced and/or improved and an accountable senior owner attends the Programme Board.

Since the completion of this engagement, Principality has been able to deploy a higher volume of business change projects at an improved quality level as a direct consequence of the changes made in the ways of working within the PMO and between the IT and business change functions.

CMC Partnership's Programme Office Healthceck Flyer provides further information in regard to this Healthcheck Service.