Transformation Roundtable: Prioritising transformation projects and programmes to assign resource

Date: 18 February 2025

Facilitated by Amanda Pujol, Director of Customer Experience and Transformation, Teignbridge District Council

Speakers:

• Davinder Gill, Corporate Programme Office Manager – Transformation, St Helens Council,
• Jonathan Carton and Darren Avery, PMO Managers, Adult Social Care & Health, Kent County Council.

Davinder Gill shared how St Helen’s Council has had a significant number of transformation programmes and explained how they wanted to increase their understanding of the impacts of projects and further clarify the aims of each delivery programme. DV explained how the PMO was established to pull together an approach to understand and capture all the projects and programmes across the organisation. 

Davinder discussed their agreed approach which included:

• Call to action – capture all organisational projects and programmes.
• Rationalise – apply project principles to allow differentiation of PMO projects and BAU.
• Prioritise – undertake a prioritisation exercise to identify key transformational drivers of change.

After undertaking the prioritisation exercise, they were able to focus on moving forward with projects which provided a high strategic value and question anything of low strategic value. Davinder stated St Helen’s Council following this exercise had a portfolio of 12 programmes. This allowed them to have a closer alignment with budgets/savings planning.

Darren Avery and Jonathan Carton shared how they prioritise projects within the Adult Social Care and Health directorate at Kent County Council, in their PMO which is part of the transformation and delivery team.

They undertake a five-step process: 

• New Request – an MS form is submitted for a new piece of work.
• Triage – PMO undertakes an initial triage, determining whether this is for a new piece of work, supports an existing project or is a request for information.
• Prioritisation – any new proposed activities are scored using the prioritisation matrix.
• Approval & Resource Allocation – scores are approved by senior management
• Darren explained that the fifth and final step is reviewing the activity and scores. He shared that most of the projects don’t change drastically, but it is more of a checkpoint to ensure that they are still delivering high value.

Darren shared some recommendations such as keeping it relevant but reviewing and updating the questions and weightings frequently. He also emphasised the importance of ‘convening the added value to all key stakeholders’ and assuring colleagues in the directorate that their voices are being heard.

Q1. Was the prioritisation exercise to determine where to focus resources, types of monitoring and/or another purpose?

It was to determine which transformation programmes and projects added the most strategic value and therefore which we should focus our efforts on delivering and subsequently which would require a PMO resource.

Q2. Was this a point in time exercise, or do you use this for new projects/programmes coming on stream? If latter, how do you then negotiate the removal of activities outside of the Portfolio?

It was a point in time exercise to determine what our Strategic Transformation Portfolio would contain. All Strategic Outline Business Cases proposing a new programme or project include the strategic value and risk scores to assist decision making as to whether the business case is approved. Negotiating the removal of activities was done through discussion and conversation with Directors and Heads of Service to understand impact and recommendations made to strategic leadership team, chaired by the Chief Executive, for a decision.

Q3. Did you stop anything as well, and how did you manage that happening? 

Not in St Helens, but yes in a previous LA where I applied the same methodology.  It was done through discussion and conversation with Directors and Heads of Service to understand impact and recommendations made to strategic leadership team, chaired by the Chief Executive, for a decision. 

Q4. Who made the decision on each of the prioritisation criteria scoring? An individual or group of subject matter experts? Other?

Strategic Leadership Team, chaired by the Chief Executive, approved the approach and methodology. The Chair of the Investment and Change Board (Director of Resources) then sent out an email to all Directors advising of the exercise and process.

Q5. How was the administration involved i.e. councillors?

In St Helens, no programmes/projects were ceased, some projects were merged to create programmes and re-scoped.  Had there been a decision to cease any, the relevant Portfolio Holder would have been engaged. 

Q6. What is your resourcing strategy for corporate projects - is it from permanent resources or do you bring in when you need it?

From existing resources.

Q7. What roles/resources do you have available for the transformation projects in your team?  

The PMO has three full-time Programme Managers and one full-time Policy & Transformation Officer.

Q8. How was the agreed programme of work governed?  Was it by service area or a holistic approach?

Each programme has a Programme Board, chaired by the SRO (all SROs are at Director level), and a Steering Group made up of workstream leads. Programme Boards report into a Strategic Change and Transformation Board, chaired by the Chief Executive.  A Transformation Dashboard which includes progress against all programmes in the Transformation Portfolio is presented to the Strategic Change and Transformation Board on a quarterly basis.

Q1. How does your area align with corporate transformation?

The prioritisation process scores activities based on alignment to ASCH and KCC strategies, especially the most recent KCC strategy focussing on sustainable budgets.

Q2. Do you corporately follow a prioritisation process or is this just for Adult Services?

This is just for ASCH, as our Directorate has a PMO to support the process - though as previous answer covers, our activities must align with corporate priorities in order to be progressed as a project.

Q3. Is your structure replicated across the other PMOs within Kent?

We are the only PMO in Kent County Council at present.

Q4. This looks like a lot of infrastructure and resourcing for your adults directorate. Is this replicated for other directorates of your council and, if so, how do these interface - if they do?

This is an ASCH process only, we do not have a formal process for linking resources between Directorates at present (though this hasn't strictly been required so far)

Q5. How does this fit with more allocation of centrally controlled resources eg IT Digital team, business analysts etc?

Although we have no oversight or control over other teams' resources, we forecast what might be required (and when) in our resource plan and put in resource requests with other teams as early as possible. Where we are aware of strains on particular teams - e.g. our Performance Team, we aim to schedule projects in such a way that we don't have too many projects vying for the same resource at the same time - we stagger them.

Q6. How much information do you ask for in the New Request form?

We currently have around 14 questions that we ask, which cover each of the dimensions we prioritise against. The form takes approximately 10-15 minutes to complete depending on the level of info provided.

Q7. Have you opened up the new request part of the process to customers, contractors and Elected Members?  If so, how has this gone - any tips to manage this?

No we have not at this stage, though the form is open to all our operational staff, not just senior management. This is an interesting idea, however at present resourcing is stretched thinly to cover the existing demands of the business - expansion to taking ideas from people we support is perhaps a future aspiration!

Q8. Do you have tools/templates to give to those who fall into the info and advice category?

Yes, we have created a Teams Site for anyone in ASCH Directorate that has most of the Project Management tools and templates our team uses, plus guidance on how to use them, APM publications, and training slide decks and recordings we've made over time on various topics.

Q9. How do you ensure projects don't bypass the process?

All ASCH project management resource is within our team, and we allocate the resources, so it's not possible for a formal project to start without us being aware and assign. Operational staff may wish to run their own, light-touch projects, but even those are capture within our portfolio reporting and we discuss ALL change activity at a monthly portfolio board. Where possible, we would also look to provide information, advice and guidance to operational staff running projects, to increase the consistency and improve the chances of success.

Q10. How much work have you done on change management and getting the organisational culture 'change ready'? 

In terms of implementing this process, we met with the various senior managers and explained how the process would work, what the scoring system was and how everything was weighted, and got their agreement on each aspect. We then introduced the form and said that all new requests had to go through the form moving forward. 

Q11. How long do you try and do steps 1-4 within i.e. 1-2 weeks? or can it be a while until a project can even start?

3 working days after receipt of the form to review and do an initial triage, another week from there to review the request with SMT and consider resourcing options and agree something. Project start date will depend on availability of resource - at present, probably have around a 3-4 week lead-in. 

Q12. How do you resource the assessment phase - is it just PMO or are there others involved? e.g. Business Analysts to help assess/validate benefit

We assign a Project Manager or Senior Project Officer to do the Assessment phase, they will then draw on other resources required as necessary. For Tier 1 projects we also tend to assign a Project Officer to support the project who can do a lot of the analysis - often other teams are only required to provide data for us to analyse

Q13. How long did it take to develop the process and start to adopt?

About 1 month to come up with the process, create a form and spreadsheet, test it out a couple of times, and start preparing slide decks to show Senior Management. Another month to move it through all of the sign-offs. Once signed off, the Form became the only way to create a project!

Q14. What software do you use to manage the portfolio and its reporting of progress, benefit monitoring etc.?

We use Verto, a Project Management System, in combination with Power BI for all of our reporting purposes.

The roundtable discussion centred on finances and the alignment of projects with the medium-term financial plan. Colleagues highlighted that their successful project prioritisation begins with a clear understanding of the underlying problem, coupled with a critical review of the evidence gathered. Additionally, there were discussions about the differences between corporate and departmental approaches to service improvement and prioritisation.

Another key topic of discussion was Local Government Reorganisation (LGR) and its impact on the reprioritisation of resources and objectives. One council shared insights into how they plan transformation across separate transition phases to manage transformation to clearly understand timelines, objectives and priorities. 

Additionally, colleagues discussed the challenges of benefit realisation, particularly the difficulty in obtaining prioritisation information from the services they are trying to engage. They also explored strategies for defining cost avoidance and efficiency more clearly.

The session concluded with colleagues highlighting it was useful to identify what is not a priority for senior management. It was suggested that by establishing a clear governing authority with your authority you can streamline multiple governance meetings into one. Additionally, it was recommended that colleagues could implement annual SRO (Senior Responsible Owner) training for the senior management structure to ensure they stay updated and refreshed on key responsibilities.