About Enterprise Delivery



The primary purpose of this site is to describe how Enterprise Delivery Limited has successfully approached the project challenge. Each success experience has required a unique, iterative blend of the aspects described.

 The Enterprise Delivery Method »

Enterprise Delivery Method

  • Because each success experience has required a unique approach this model primarily illustrates the categories of activity and what they entail rather than their order or separation. The model is always tailored to suit each unique project and any formal or informal established models within the customer’s Enterprise.
  • For example on some Enterprise Delivery projects it has been prudent for the customer’s IT Department to have a view of the ‘Technical Architecture Preparation’ challenge much early on and as part of the ‘Business Requirements Focus’.


 BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS FOCUS
Initial analysis is carried out in order to fully understand the brief. This is essentially a capture of high-level business requirements. It includes gaining an understanding of the opportunities, the background, the issues, the processes, the existing business model (the business architecture).

 BUSINESS CASE
An outline of the features to be realised in the future state. The proposal of costs and the effort required. A statement of the benefits, ideally monetised in order to gain strong business sponsorship.

 SCOPING
A more detailed analysis and definition of what is included in the project Delivery and highlighting of any aspects to be more firmly defined during the life of the project.
Some Customers have required a significant investment of time and effort with this aspect, which has been essential given some organisation wide projects and established Enterprise cultures require extensive, and weighty project mobilisation activity for momentum to be gained. Also project activity exposure and sense checking of the project artefacts at this early stage can save huge amounts of time later on by building confidence, strengthening stakeholder engagement, insuring sponsorship, agreeing funding and attracting focus. This is achieved by educating and involving all concerned parties on progress.

 HIGH LEVEL PLANNING AND ESTIMATION
Regardless of whether the project is Agile, Waterfall or something in between, this aspect involves estimating resources required either from external sources or from within the organisation to inform an initial planning exercise.
Timelines established at this stage help give an early view of sprint and/or work package planning and indicative Delivery dates.
Depending on the type of project, this aspect is often extended to include the resources required to maintain and support the future state so the Enterprise can understand the future state operating costs.

 SOLUTION DEFINITION
A specification of the ‘As-Is’ and the ‘To-Be’ systems architecture. This focuses primarily on the applications, software, data, and any data migration challenges and systems integration.

 TECHNICAL ARCHITECTURE PREPARATION
Specification and preparation of the hardware, networks and security. This is often progressed closely with customer technical teams to ensure the solution is not only consistent with the customer’s technical stack but to permit sensible checkpoints being followed to enable efficient transition to technical sign off and a supportable, continuous and sustainable future state.

 CONTINUOUS ITERATIVE DELIVERY TO THE ENTERPRISE
This principle is applied by Enterprise Delivery to both Agile and Waterfall project methods. Whether project Delivery is divided into Agile Sprints formed from a Product Backlog or individual Work Packages that may be programmed into a Waterfall Plan, Enterprise Delivery prescribes management of these packages of effort as consecutive cycles in order to give continuous transparency to Stakeholders and Customer teams.
Again as with the overall process, these cycles and the quantity of them are tailored to suit localised and individual projects and also in alignment with how the Enterprise likes to get things done. For example, it has often been necessary to commence Business Change activity earlier in the cycle and even from the outset of the entire project.

 ITERATION PLANNING AND PRIORITISATION
Detailed planning of what will be accomplished in the next work package or iteration of work. How it will be achieved, by whom and what exactly is the behaviour of the solution being sought. This is another opportunity for all involved to challenge and understand the interdependencies between deliverable chunks of work.

 TECHNICAL OPERATIONAL SUPPORT AND REVIEW
Evaluation and communication with Technical operational and support teams to ensure all that is needed is appropriate and is in at a state of readiness to support, test and release what is about the be developed.

 DEVELOPMENT
This primarily includes the writing of the software and often encapsulates the testing activity. Enterprise Delivery seeks this activity to happen as iteratively as possible with features divided into small deliverables for frequent inspection, customer team inclusion and strong daily communication to support the requirements definition and decision-making that guides development.

 TESTING
Testing of the Development to ensure system behaviour is as expected and is appropriate to requirements.

 ACCEPTANCE
User acceptance that the solution has been appropriately tested and is appropriate for deployment.

 BUSINESS CHANGE
Ensuring the Enterprise is at a state of readiness to adopt the change and to realise the benefits. This can include training, communication and process change to insure business continuity and improvement.

 DEPLOYMENT
The release of the solution or solution packages. This could be the live business ready environment ready for immediate benefit realisation or perhaps firstly to an environment prior to live if there is a dependency on later activities or solution elements.

 BENEFITS REALISATION
An evaluation on how successful the Business Change and Deployment has been. Identification of key learnings and changes to feed into the next cycle.
Measurement of benefits being realised during the project and sharing this data with stakeholders to ensure continued investment in any additional iterations.

 POST PROJECT REVIEW
The measurement of benefits realisation for the whole project. Identification of knowledge and learnings to feed into the customer’s PMO (Project Management Office) in order to benefit related and future projects.

 CORE PRINCIPLES
Central to the diagram describing the Enterprise Delivery model are the foundations upon which the successful cycles of development and change are dependant.
Experienced Project Governance that maximises input from all stakeholders and in particular product owners and customer teams.
Strong focus on evolving the architecture of the Enterprise and the aspects within that include:
a) Business Architecture: Business processes and models.
b) Solutions Architecture: Applications, software, data and systems integration.
c) Technical Architecture: the hardware, networks and security.

Contact

Walt Cahill is the owner and founder of Enterprise Delivery Limited.
Walt Cahill – LinkedIn Profile »

Successes

Examples of success span the disciplines of Project Management, Analysis and Consulting:

 Agile Project Management Success »
Project Management Success »
Programme Management Success »
Analysis Success »
Consulting Success »

Project Management Success

PROJECT: HR FLEXIBLE BENEFITS SYSTEMS INTEGRATION
Situation: Three HR/Payroll systems required integrating to enable a Flexible Benefits service to employees within a large commercial Enterprise.
Intervention: Coordination of four external companies and five internal departments, action tracking, solution definition meetings, produced and maintained data flow architecture diagrams, IT department acceptance meetings.
Results: Implementation of data flow solution with strong focus on post-live support framework.

 PROJECT: HR BUSINESS ANALYSIS
Situation: The HR Department within a large commercial Enterprise required system improvements to support a strategy for increasing employee engagement across the Enterprise. They also wished to redirect any time gained from system efficiencies towards supporting the engagement effort.
Intervention: Analysis of as-is solution architecture, weekly team stakeholder meetings, functional breakdown and analysis of HR business architecture, process workshops, definition of to-be solution architecture and proposal of next step activities.
Results:
1) Customer realisation of cost and challenge in integrating best of breed HR and related systems.
2) Identification of how most of the business needs discovered in the analysis did not require the assumed systems integration or replacement but could instead be realised by a proposed improvement in reporting functionality
3) Customer used analysis to inform key decisions: a) Halt implementation of learning tools solution and switch to functionality emerging within another application, b) Invest in Flexible Benefits system integration, c) Progress new intranet platform and associated integrations.

 PROJECT: CORPORATE WEB SITE DESIGN SERVICE
Situation: Barrier to customers’ ASP sales pitch was cost and complexity of their clients commissioning design agencies.
Intervention: Developed web design team capability to accept briefs, brainstorm and deliver pitches. Produced in-house manuals on how to design and code solutions requiring either minimal or no back end redevelopment.
Results: Multiple pitch and Delivery successes. Designs produced for speculative pitches were commonly successful against competitor bids. Design service extended to display advertising and templates.

 PROJECT: REDESIGN OF RECRUITMENT SERVICES SITE AND JOB BOARD B2B SITE
Situation: The web site design of a leading Online Recruitment Services company looking dated. A professional B2B site was required to support sales activity and communicate the relationship between the Recruitment Services and Job Board arms of the business.
Intervention: Applied principles from an earlier Corporate Career Site Design project. Fostered a collaborative yet competitive environment in the Design team. Managed design selection process with Marketing and Product Development teams.
Results: Successful release of both designs. Signposting to B2B site introduced on all marketing promotions and communications.

 PROJECT: CONTENT MANGEMENT SYSTEM
Situation: This ecommerce customer required a Web user interface, CMS and associated content workflows for staff to control core content, site pages and graphics.
Intervention: Liaised closely with development team on options and design. Project continued to be progressed post live to improve usability and automation. Strong focus on testing.
Results: Systems and a user interface that was good enough to later reuse as client admin access feature.

 PROJECT: WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
Situation: This ecommerce company required functionality for their back office to include: CRM pipeline integration, order entry, order status and billing integration.
Intervention: Work shopped and brainstormed workflows. Worked closely with Sales teams to establish rate card and fulfilment expectation. Commissioned CRM system enhancements from 3rd party to deliver pipeline forms and database. Established in-house super user role for future customisations.
Results: Efficient single user interface booking and fulfilment management system integrated with the core CRM system and database.

 PROJECT: OVERSEAS OUTSOURCING
Situation: This commercial Enterprise needed to reduce the cost of manual activity deployed to optimise data processing workflows. Inability to process data quickly was distracting their clients from appreciating the overall USP.
Intervention: Supplier selection process. Training and QA of service in test environment. Testing and trial period. Contract agreement.
Results: In house team reduced from 30 to 8. Ability to deal with workflow spikes.

 PROJECT: INTERNAL ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT SERVICE
Situation: This ecommerce company required renewals success to no longer be compromised by inconsistent service during the life of the subscription.
Intervention: Analysis of account management activity. Definition of account management best practice. Identified reasons for salesperson to call clients and IAM’s (Internal Account Managers) to create up-sell opportunities between renewals. Established a virtual team of IAM’s. Introduced a reward structure.
Results: CRM system reports and IAM captured evidence of success was used to support account renewal pitches and also to demonstrate increased renewal rates for managed accounts.

 PROJECT: INTRODUCTION AND ESTABLISHMENT OF DIGITAL WORKFLOWS
Situation: This national media organisation required the removal of offsite manual processes. Establishment of a digital studio operation was required in advance of a systems integration go-live.
Intervention: Software selection, establishment of specifications, design and testing of workflows, extensive team and user training,
Results: Digital workflow. Increased sales time achieved by offering later deadlines. Quality of reproduction enabled scope expansion to additional products.

 PROJECT: ESTABLISH AND IMPROVE DIGITAL WORKFLOWS
Situation: Despite digitisation of content in-house, material was still being supplied to this major media customer in a non-digital format. There was also no mechanism to move content efficiently between two regional offices.
Intervention: Software selected for digital transmission solution. Once skills developed, a service for receiving content electronically was introduced. Robust checking processes introduced.
Results: Reduction of both cost and the logistical barriers preventing sale. Quicker processes enabled later sales deadlines.

 PROJECT: SOLUTION PROPOSAL FOR REPLACEMENT COMMERCIAL ADVERTISING MANAGEMENT AND ORDERING SYSTEMS
Situation: Sponsors within a major UK media organisation sought an alternative solution proposal in response to a new strategy to seek reduced reliance on unique in-house systems development skills. A new technology strategy suggested Agile web development learning be applied also to business systems development by investing in cloud-based applications.
Intervention: High-level business analysis, gap analysis, supplier selection. Interviewed U.S newspaper companies. Attended Salesforce.com’s U.S. Dreamforce. Commissioned blueprinting engagement from a Salesforce.com Agile implementation partner. Applied Agile requirements gathering.
Results: High-level business requirements, high level architecture roadmap, high-level solution architecture and scope definition. Presentation of these documents describing strategy for integrated cloud based solutions. Business proposal based on iterative development successfully progressed to the next stage thereby enabling next step JAD and Agile development methodologies.

 PROJECT: ARCHITECTURE ROADMAP
Situation: The IT department of a large Enterprise was struggling with an extensive list of business demands on Technology but little prioritisation or business ownership for benefit cases.
Intervention: Analysis and architecture workshops with business customer departments.
Strategic skills workshops to analyse in-house development capability versus future skills roadmap.
Results: Documentation and presentations of proposed priorities, high-level business cases and options to support process of business decision making with regard to both operating and capital expenditure.

 PROJECT: COMMERCIAL ADVERTISING SYSTEMS REPLACEMENT PROPOSAL
Situation: Business sponsors within this major UK media organisation stipulated the future system be achieved through gradual and incremental change of existing systems by external partners working with internal staff.
Intervention: Led the IT input. Worked with business customer to establish vision, requirements, supplier assessment and gap analysis. Commissioned agile consultants to chair ‘away days’ to prioritise requirements, elucidate misunderstood obstacles to success and to help break the waterfall thinking. Overcame people barriers to success. Achieved seed funding approval for a commissioned technical architecture review and solution architecture proposal from a global outsourcing provider. Recruited contract Project Manager and Business Analyst to ensure project focus.
Results: Board paper proposing ad systems evolution by outsourcing/offshore partner, supported by internal staff.

 PROJECT: PROJECT PROCESS
Situation: Absence of development or project methodologies restricting ability of IT to engage with distributed business owners and their own technology resources.
Intervention: Analysis of current state. Established a broad project process (Engagement Policy). This wasn’t a methodology but a workflow that business partners agreed to follow.
Results: The agreed principles obliged acceptance of IT involvement in early stages of projects and ensured requirements analysis, solution definition and robust selection processes were carried out. Enabled a line to be drawn upon which to set tolerances.

 PROJECT: RISK ASSESSMENT OF SYSTEMS SUPPORT AND DEVELOPMENT
Situation: Staff concerns on development disciplines raised at Director level within this large commercial organisation. High risk of loosing highly skilled and unsettled staff.
Intervention: Investigated issues. Analysis and discovery of issues around process and team working. Agreement of proposal to enforce code change disciplines and introduction of Junior DBA to support additional activity.
Results: New change process and guidelines reduced chance of issues occurring particularly out-of-hours. The improved collaboration process increased awareness and knowledge required for issue resolution. Key staff were retained.

 PROJECT: RESTRUCTURE OF TECHNICAL SUPPORT TEAM
Situation: Single point of dependency on one manager across a business critical 24/7 service within a large commercial operation. Unacceptable variance of skills, abilities and performance existed within the team.
Intervention: Analysis of issues. Change management included mentoring of managers and teams to realise need for change. Coaching of key team members before and after transition. New team structure, which included the establishment of four deputy manager roles.
Results: Level of support increased. Risks reduced. Low implementation cost due to new appointments being recruited from within existing team.

Programme Management Success

PROJECT MANAGEMENT OFFICE (PMO)
Service provision:
Fulfilment of a senior management role within the PMO of a large commercial Enterprise.
Operated across a newly formed consolidation of two technology departments (web and business) practicing both agile and waterfall methodologies.
Strong focus on defining Enterprise cloud computing solutions, which required the facilitation of Agile requirements gathering methods and iterative mindset towards future development.
Responsibilities included the management and development of end-to-end project capability and also central management for shared outsourced or co-sourced technical Delivery services.
Joined Technology Board. This was a body of senior technology managers from a newly consolidated department tasked by the Board of Directors with providing technology strategy, evidence based decision-making and recommendations on capital expenditure.

 PROJECT PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT
Situation: A number of business owned and sponsored projects within a large media Enterprise required key IT deliverables.
Intervention: Delicately and robustly managed business analysis, technical Delivery and handover to support across concurrent projects. Reviewed and supported capital requests for new projects. Became a member of the organisation’s Technical Steering Group (internal body set up to make IT recommendations to both the customer’s board of directors and also the board of the parent group). Drafted monthly management reports, weekly reporting, project progress reporting.
Results: Enabled new functionality inc. Procure to Pay, Circulation System upgrade, Job site, Econfirmations, Fixed Assets, Chart of Accounts overhaul, Rights Management, Circulation reporting.

 PROJECT: CORPORATE WEB SITE DESIGN SERVICE
Situation: Barrier to customers’ ASP sales pitch was cost and complexity of their clients commissioning design agencies.
Intervention: Developed web design team capability to accept briefs, brainstorm and deliver pitches. Produced in-house manuals on how to design and code solutions requiring either minimal or no back end redevelopment.
Results: Multiple pitch and Delivery successes. Designs produced for speculative pitches were commonly successful against competitor bids. Design service extended to display advertising and templates.

 PROJECT: REDESIGN OF RECRUITMENT SERVICES SITE AND JOB BOARD B2B SITE
Situation: The web site design of a leading Online Recruitment Services company looking dated. A professional B2B site was required to support sales activity and communicate the relationship between the Recruitment Services and Job Board arms of the business.
Intervention: Applied principles from an earlier Corporate Career Site Design project. Fostered a collaborative yet competitive environment in the Design team. Managed design selection process with Marketing and Product Development teams.
Results: Successful release of both designs. Signposting to B2B site introduced on all marketing promotions and communications.

 PROJECT: CONTENT MANGEMENT SYSTEM
Situation: This ecommerce customer required a Web user interface, CMS and associated content workflows for staff to control core content, site pages and graphics.
Intervention: Liaised closely with development team on options and design. Project continued to be progressed post live to improve usability and automation. Strong focus on testing.
Results: Systems and a user interface that was good enough to later reuse as client admin access feature.

 PROJECT: WORKFLOW MANAGEMENT SYSTEM
Situation: This ecommerce company required functionality for their back office to include: CRM pipeline integration, order entry, order status and billing integration.
Intervention: Work shopped and brainstormed workflows. Worked closely with Sales teams to establish rate card and fulfilment expectation. Commissioned CRM system enhancements from 3rd party to deliver pipeline forms and database. Established in-house super user role for future customisations.
Results: Efficient single user interface booking and fulfilment management system integrated with the core CRM system and database.

 PROJECT: OVERSEAS OUTSOURCING
Situation: This commercial Enterprise needed to reduce the cost of manual activity deployed to optimise data processing workflows. Inability to process data quickly was distracting their clients from appreciating the overall USP.
Intervention: Supplier selection process. Training and QA of service in test environment. Testing and trial period. Contract agreement.
Results: In house team reduced from 30 to 8. Ability to deal with workflow spikes.

 PROJECT: INTERNAL ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT SERVICE
Situation: This ecommerce company required renewals success to no longer be compromised by inconsistent service during the life of the subscription.
Intervention: Analysis of account management activity. Definition of account management best practice. Identified reasons for salesperson to call clients and IAM’s (Internal Account Managers) to create up-sell opportunities between renewals. Established a virtual team of IAM’s. Introduced a reward structure.
Results: CRM system reports and IAM captured evidence of success was used to support account renewal pitches and also to demonstrate increased renewal rates for managed accounts.

 PROJECT: INTRODUCTION AND ESTABLISHMENT OF DIGITAL WORKFLOWS
Situation: This national media organisation required the removal of offsite manual processes. Establishment of a digital studio operation was required in advance of a systems integration go-live.
Intervention: Software selection, establishment of specifications, design and testing of workflows, extensive team and user training,
Results: Digital workflow. Increased sales time achieved by offering later deadlines. Quality of reproduction enabled scope expansion to additional products.

 PROJECT: ESTABLISH AND IMPROVE DIGITAL WORKFLOWS
Situation: Despite digitisation of content in-house, material was still being supplied to this major media customer in a non-digital format. There was also no mechanism to move content efficiently between two regional offices.
Intervention: Software selected for digital transmission solution. Once skills developed, a service for receiving content electronically was introduced. Robust checking processes introduced.
Results: Reduction of both cost and the logistical barriers preventing sale. Quicker processes enabled later sales deadlines.

Analysis Success

BUSINESS ANALYSIS: HR BUSINESS ANALYSIS
Situation: The HR Department within a large commercial Enterprise required system improvements to support a strategy for increasing employee engagement across the Enterprise. They also wished to redirect any time gained from system efficiencies towards supporting the engagement effort.
Intervention: Analysis of as-is solution architecture, weekly team stakeholder meetings, functional breakdown and analysis of HR business architecture, process workshops, definition of to-be solution architecture and proposal of next step activities.
Results:
1) Customer realisation of cost and challenge in integrating best of breed HR and related systems.
2) Identification of how most of the business needs discovered in the analysis did not require the assumed systems integration or replacement but could instead be realised by a proposed improvement in reporting functionality.
3) Customer used analysis to inform key decisions: a) Halt implementation of learning tools solution and switch to functionality emerging within another application, b) Invest in Flexible Benefits system integration, c) Progress new intranet platform and associated integrations.

 BUSINESS ANALYSIS: BENEFITS STATEMENT
Service provided:
Produced a benefits statement, which formed core of business case and enabled capital expenditure approval for replacement of Commercial Advertising Management and Order Entry Systems for a large UK media company.

 SOLUTION ANALYSIS: SOLUTION SPACE PROPOSAL
Service provided:
Managed the exploration of solution space for multiple systems required to form future advertising system solutions for a major UK media company.

 SOLUTION ANALYSIS: IT RENEWAL
Service provided:
Provided analysis for this large media organisation through being a member of the Commercial IT Renewal Team.
Advised on the design and implementation of new advertising booking, page planning and production tracking systems.

 MANAGEMENT ACCOUNTING
Service provided:
Management of sales reporting and analysis activities for the Finance Director of an Ecommerce company.

Consultancy Success

BUSINESS PROCESS REVIEW
Service provided: Assigned by a large UK media company to work with their commissioned management consultancy on a company wide business process review.
Initially this was to review the commercial, production and selling activities of the advertising department.
Involvement was extended when success enabled the review to be progressed across the customer’s Enterprise.

 BUSINESS PROCESS MANAGEMENT
Situation: An ecommerce organisation required there to be close management of processes and integration of additional workflows following the acquisition of another company.
The scope included processes, support systems and back office workflow systems.
Goal achievement: The activities involved data feeds and fast tracking of consultancy workflows. Design, testing, and evolution of self-service and site back-office tools. Implementation of production web tools.

 CLIENT ACCOUNT MANAGEMENT
Service Provided: Account service management for an Ecommerce organisation.

 M&A CONSULTANCY
Situation: An ecommerce organisation on two separate occasions sought technical consultancy in projects to acquire companies that might compliment it’s commercial online service offering.
Goal achievement: Led and concluded two technical due diligence exercises.
Carried out and delivered the production and user functionality assessment aspects.

 BUSINESS START UP
Service Provided: Joined the management team of an internet start up at the very beginning (7 months prior to launch). This role on the Management Core Team continued until leaving the company.

 CUSTOMER MANGEMENT
Service provided: Interacted with senior management and senior users across a large commercial Enterprise with regards to projects, systems support and demand management.
Established role of ‘Technical Business Partner’ within the team. Established a good rapport with business partners, whilst asserting budget limitations, transparency and the need for sponsored business cases.

 SYSTEMS AND WORKFLOW INTEGRATION: ECOMMERCE
Situation: An ecommerce company required help with a number of initiatives.
Goal achievement: Initiative included:
Implementation of content management.
Workflow and data integration of a new partner plus also assistance with the transition following the purchase of a competitor.

 SYSTEMS AND WORKFLOW INTEGRATION: PROCESS SCOPE EXPANSION
Situation: This large media publishing company required it’s digital production department to adopt more workflows from other areas of the business.
Goal achievement: Introduction of magazine product and copy chasing responsibilities to the department.
Integration of display advert scanning and placement. Implementation of digital receipt.
Management of improvements in digital workflow control and tracking.
Managed introduction of page planning and pagination for all printed products.

 AUDIT LIAISON
Service provided: Key contact and IT point of responsibility for internal and external systems security audits for a large commercial Enterprise.
Included Finance and Commercial ERP systems, DBA responsibilities and post project review audits.

 TEAM MANAGEMENT: PROJECT MANAGEMENT OFFICE
Situation: A large UK Media organisation required an Enterprise centre of excellence for progressing new projects.
Goal achievement: Design and formation of new department within a large IT Department incorporating a mix of Analyst and Architect roles.
Recruitment and on boarding of Enterprise Architect, Solutions Architect, Business Analyst, Technical Analyst, Project Analyst and Programme Support Office team members.
Escalation of engagement in business areas unaccustomed to Analyst and Architect intervention.

 TEAM MANAGEMENT: BUSINESS SYSTEMS
Situation: A large commercial Enterprise needed four disparate departments responsible for systems development to be merged into a single more effective internal service.
Intervention: Operational and people management of four sub-teams: Oracle Applications Support team, DBA team, Commercial Systems Development team, Projects Team of analysts plus external contractors.
Objective setting, appraisals, progress monitoring, reviewing and supporting.
Results: Sub-teams were enabled to work together and collaborate better.
Department was equipped with better group working skills and to engage better with the Enterprise.

 TEAM MANAGEMENT: DEVELOPMENT TEAM
Situation: A large commercial Enterprise required their IT development specialists across the organisation to share understanding of the Enterprise architecture and work collaboratively on future developments.
Goal achievement: Formed and chaired a Technical Design Group, which consisted of senior Enterprise IT staff,
Scope included development processes, team collaboration, better practices and technical architecture direction.
Established new role of Project Support Office with new responsibilities for request and Delivery tracking, tech ops communication, admin and coordination around IT deliveries.

 TEAM MANAGEMENT: PUBLISHING PRODUCTION TEAM
Situation: Following recommendations from an external consultant, a large publishing company sought to merge its Ad Production teams under one department.
Goal achievement: Management of a team of Fifty (inc. five managers). Team activities included ad design and ad production, page planning, copy chasing, classified page pagination, ad booking/workflow management system development and training.
Team responsibilities covered sixty weekly deadlines across 23 products.

 CRM SYSTEMS OPERATIONS
Situation: An ecommerce company required CRM systems ownership to include development to deliver Financial Reporting, Management Accounting and Workflow Management.
Goal achievement: Management of this key project, which included merging CRM data with an outsourced cold calling operation.

 TEAM MANAGEMENT: DESIGN TEAM
Service Provided: Operational management of the Design Team within an ecommerce Enterprise.
Team activities included production and design of advertising and corporate careers sites.
Introduced accessibility and DDA compliancy.

 TEAM MANAGEMENT: FULFILMENT TEAM
Service Provided: Formation of Production Department and processes within an ecommerce company.
Included recruitment of Design and Production start up team.

 RECRUITMENT
Service Provided: Led all IT recruitment activities throughout the duration of this assignment for this large commercial Enterprise. Activities including the interview and selection process.
Updated and enhanced Job Descriptions to support department evolution.

 HR CONSULTANCY
Service Provided: Operated throughout duration of this exercise for this large commercial Enterprise as a member of the IT management team and associate of HR department with a dotted line report to HR Director.
Helped re-engineer the IT organisational structure through change management.
Handled specific issues: retirements, maternity cover, disciplinary process, and long-term sickness.

 MANAGEMENT COACHING
Situation: The IT Department within a large commercial Enterprise required it’s management team members to increase their levels of responsibility to enable the Senior Managers to take on more of a leadership role.
Service provided: Developed self-sufficiency of department manager tier through mentoring, supporting and developing the team.
Chaired a weekly management meeting. Agenda was focussed on issues and decision-making outside of day-to-day technical operational activities.
Instigated areas of career development including external training and campaigning for budgets for longer term staff development.

 OUTSOURCED SERVICE MANAGEMENT
Service provided: Managed provision of support and development services from third parties for a number of different large commercial Enterprises.

 ORGANISATION RENEWAL
Service provided: Consultancy provided through membership of a Technology Organisational Renewal team, tasked with redesigning and centralising the Technology function within a large commercial Enterprise.

 SYSTEMS OPERATIONAL MANAGEMENT
Service provided: Ownership of development and operational support of commercial systems within a large media Enterprise:
Oracle e-business suite (AR, AP, GL, HR, Payroll), Advertising systems, Rights Management, Syndication, Analytical CRM, Circulation, Reporting (Business Objects), Management Information System.
Responsibility for tracking and review of support issue pipeline.

Consultancy

Enterprise Delivery views strategic consulting as the bridge between the decomposition of analysis and the synthesis within Project Management.
  • The consulting service is not a method for identifying projects but a process for locating untapped opportunities and potential for benefits to be engineered.
  • Consulting involves examining internal and external forces upon the Enterprise by taking both a programme and organisation wide view.
  • It can involve a focussed health check on areas highlighted for attention by the customer, examinations on the fit for purpose state, methods, efficiencies and approach within the overall strategic context.
  • Consulting Successes »


Analysis

Customers gain a deeper understanding of their opportunities and related issues by having Enterprise Delivery analyse business functions, as-is processes and solution readiness to ensure the business can be improved at the right time and in the right way.
  • Business analysis activities typically start with the decomposition of complex situations to shed light on pathways to solutions. This unravelling and assessment provides a strong but complementary contrast to the Project Management services of Enterprise Delivery which involve a different but related focus: synthesis, development and build.
  • Analysis can require Enterprise Delivery to facilitate the collaborative engagement of customer teams and stakeholders often through workshops and informed group decision-making.
  • The output of these analysis stages is the provision of insight to stakeholders and sponsors on the As-Is Business situation and the benefit opportunities, with specific focus on the solution behaviour, solution readiness assessment and recommendations for progressing to the next stage.
  • Analysis Successes »


Agile (Scrum) Project Management Success

PROJECT: REDESIGN OF A UK NATIONAL NEWSPAPER WEBSITE.
Situation: The site design had not changed for two years. It looked dated and was becoming unstructured.
Intervention: Project Manager and ScrumMaster of development team. Primary role was to deliver the solution by promoting and enabling Agile development. Focussed strongly on empowering the Product Owner whilst removing obstacles to enable a climate of efficient development and unhindered progress.
Results: Site was launched a day earlier than originally planned. Successful iterations followed which included mobile pages, blogs, commercial units and back end functionality.

 PROJECT: INTRANET REPLACEMENT
Situation: The HR and Business Change Director of a large and established commercial Enterprise required commissioned flat designs to be implemented on a new content management system.
Intervention: Sprint planning, overall estimation of effort, strong engagement of Product Owner, frequent exposure of solution in test environments, coaching of HR department in engagement with Agile process.
Results: Solution went live as planned by fulfilling key User Stories. Solution continued to develop iteratively by allocating development resource to regular sprints.

 PROJECT: CONTENT MANAGEMENT SYSTEM (AGILE BUSINESS REQUIREMENTS DEFINITION)
Situation: After some time this project for a major UK media organisation had not yielded substantial or understandable business requirements. Business customers were disenchanted with their own progress despite intention to adopt Agile and Scrum artefacts. Clear tangible results were yet to be realised from investment in back filling project secondments.
Intervention: Introduced Agile and Scrum methods. Coached business project team and supplier in User Stories, Functional Breakdowns, Agile estimating and prioritisation. Requirements gathering enabled dovetail with parallel work streams of technical and solution architecture definition.
Results: Over five hundred Agile user stories produced within a structured business architecture framework. The business gained a set of detailed yet clearly understandable requirements that they believed in, upon which solutions were designed and third party supplier contracts / commercials negotiated.

Project Management

The Project Management style of Enterprise Delivery is to be as agile and as iterative as possible but tailored to what is acceptable to the customers exiting Delivery framework and organisation culture. ScrumMaster certification in agile practices coupled with Prince2 certification in more traditional forms of project management enables the correct balance to be quickly achieved.
  • Development of agile experience and capability over the years has led to an Enterprise Delivery specialism in Agile Project Management including Scrum.
  • This agile preference is driven mainly from experiencing high customer demands for visibility, engagement, strong governance and for customer team integration to enable benefits realisation and early customer self sufficiency with the delivered solution.
  • Enterprise Delivery views the Project Management service, as it’s central activity. This is where the synthesis occurs and where the Delivery activities are focussed on the solutions and the benefit realisation.
  • The extensive and varied experience of Enterprise Delivery provides a safe pair of hands to assure Delivery and optimal deployment of resources.
  • The other service streams within Enterprise Delivery (Analysis and Consulting) often form subsets of a larger project and are handled with firm governance, sponsor and stakeholder engagement.
  • By bringing all factors affecting the project into the Enterprise climate, the focus is on de risking and carefully balancing resource, time and functionality to ensure the highest quality solution is achieved.
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