Increased agility with dynamic planning practices

Challenge

A leading process industry company had started a major, multi-year transformation. The transformation was executed through hundreds of development projects, which were given a priority and resources once a year. As the external business environment was developing unexpectedly, more dynamic approach to prioritization and resource allocation was needed to keep the transformation on track.

Brave the Future

Together with the client, August proposed to establish a new Group-level ‘Transformation Management Office’ (TMO) role, whose responsibility was to provide the tools and facilitation for more dynamic planning of the business-unit driven development projects.​

In practice, the TMO role was designed to:​

• Prioritize the business-unit driven development projects from Group-perspective (i.e. applying common prioritization framework reflecting Group’s strategy)​
• Support quarterly planning of projects and resource allocation during a year (instead of one fixed plan created during budgeting process)​
• Bring transparency to company’s overall business development portfolio (i.e. Group-level view to on-going and planned initiatives) – this kind of view was missing previously​

TMO’s role was also supposed to be facilitative in nature. Business-units and support functions were still responsible for planning their own projects, but Group-level TMO would enable agility and bring Group perspective to the decision-making.

Impact

The Group-level role was welcomed extremely well both by the business-units and support functions. Also, the top management felt that having a Group-level TMO role would make sure that the overall company transformation was going to the right direction and that the proper development efforts were always prioritized and given the necessary resources (in every market scenario).