A large public sector establishment based in Edinburgh employed Gantt Green to develop a bespoke project management methodology which would meet their unique needs. This post details the steps of how the methodology was constructed and how this was implemented across the whole IT department

As with any project, the initial task was to identify the scope of what the customer was wanting. Gantt Green facilitated a scoping exercise with key stakeholders who were invited to discuss their needs; their desires and their current frustrations.

As the meeting progressed, it became evident that there was very little structure or methodology currently employed. The organisation had grown from a small break/fix operations team and was now working with leading technology providers to build multi-million pound projects. Plans, business requirements and risk management were seriously lacking.

A proposal was drawn up that included creating process flows (based on best practice from Prince 2 and Associate of Project Managers), templates and training.

The proposal was agreed and was used as the project mandate to start the detailed information gathering exercise. One to One meetings were held with each of the key stakeholders and a solution that met all their needs was created.

Following agreement of this methodology, Gantt Green began the challenge of training all the users on the methodology. It was necessary to ensure senior management buy-in as well as the technical resources buy-in to ensure the PM methodology was followed.  Half day training sessions were setup for all resources (including senior managers) to give them an overview of the methodology.

Champions were identified during these training sessions and additional training and mentoring service was setup to allow the pose questions and gain further insight into the methodology.

Finally, an onsite SharePoint site (central repository) was setup that contained the original presentations, all templates and a detailed methodology document so each user had access to the documents.

As with any change project, there were concerns raised about the additional overhead and paperwork that would be required to implement this. By doing a lot of the work upfront (e.g. creating a methodology and templates) and showing what the benefits are, the organisation as a whole bought into it. Today, this establishment employs 2 full time project managers with some of the original champions still effectively project managing their projects.