31 March 2020 

Digital PMO and Mindset

Introduction

DM Roads - Intelligent Transport Systems (ITS) is a business that provides a range of services in road network management, including traffic signals, electronic messaging signs and in-road sensors. This business is managed as a project, because the asset owner awards the contract for a fixed period.

Motivation

The contract for which ITS maintains and improves infrastructure assets states that the internal processes and procedures must be regularly reviewed and updated to reflect practice and ensure compliance with the contract and specifications.

The asset owner's quality systems require that service providers are inspected regularly; an audit for ITS was overdue. A sister department had recently been audited, and that resulted in a list of NCRs. ITS were determined to learn from that experience by preparing well. The aim was to be fully compliant, or know about gaps and be able to discuss a plan to remedy the situation.

The Digital Audit (Internal)

A major constraint was that there was only 5 weeks to prepare: reviewing and updating all management plans and using these to get ready for the audit. ITS asked PMO Solutions to help them prepare for passing the audit with confidence.

Mindset

We discussed and decided on the following approach which would provide the best chance of success: creating a shared scoreboard and giving the team the tools and opportunities to keep improving the score. To implement this, we used the inputs of the relevant management plan / specialist processes to design an integrated digital internal audit module. Key features are transparency and accessibility of the results for the whole team.

Starting Point

The contract had already been active for several years, and the relevant documents were initially adapted from aforementioned sister organisation. However, these documents had not been regularly reviewed or updated and needed a lot of attention.

The Approach

We proposed to: (1) review and update all 30 management plans; (2) use insights from other audits to focus preparation efforts on the "big 5": environmental, safety, quality, communications & stakeholders and traffic management; (3) create the digital audit module to transparently share our current compliance scores.

The Digital Audit Module

The audit module was built on the documentation inputs; the outputs were designed to visually indicate gaps between requirements and current practice, in real-time.

The time pressure and competitive impulse to achieve the highest possible score resulted in strong engagement with all the teams.

Feedback from the ITS Team

The valuable feedback we received is that the digital audit module created awareness of what functions are performed, while also highlighting how well practice aligns with the contractual obligations.

They also mentioned our exercise helped them to consider Management Plans and Processes while they do their work and keep them actively updated along the way.

Benefits

A range of benefits was delivered through this collaboration:

• A digital audit module which is always accessible; a single source of the truth matched to a simple yet comprehensive dashboard.
• The preparation helped create checklists for the audit: it also triggered the creation of a list of documents to be maintained (registers, logs).
• All management plans were reviewed against the contract and specifications, updated, and can now be maintained.
• Created awareness around compliance with contract and specifications.
• Established need for improved record keeping and digitisation of project data, creating transparency and ensuring accessibility to this information.
• Visibility of project management challenges, and acted as a trigger to standardise project management requirements across the teams.
• Renewed focus on collaboration with contractors, and specifically how to manage their compliance quality and documentation requirements.

Audit Result

The best possible outcome: the audit resulted in ZERO Non-Conformance Reports (NCR) for DM Roads ITS! That is a huge accomplishment; a direct result of both the work described here, and the ITS team hustling to locate and organize all the documents identified.

Why choose PMO Solutions?

PMO Solutions is a specialist consultancy with focus on helping businesses deliver on their strategies through managing the achievement of benefits. Our approach is to always collaborate and our solutions are based on our experience and lessons shared by the global PMO community. We have an agile mindset and adapt to your requirements and (time) constraints.

Our team includes technology and data specialists, which allows for quick prototyping and pilot implementations; a modern PMO advocates, implements and uses technology to improve compliance and productivity. We also believe that the use of creative and artistic tools and techniques provides more visual and 'fun' communications, which results in better reception and retention of the key messages.

Having worked with DM Roads | ITS on other projects as well before this engagement, we received the following feedback:

For a confidential conversation about how we at PMO Solutions can help you lift your PMO and business performance book us a time.

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