How to deliver projects successfully and increase profitability.
Project Management
People may ask us why we are so successful at actually delivering projects on time and within budget for our customers and it isn’t a simple answer.
Perhaps its our experience, perhaps its our qualifications or perhaps it is our dedication to hitting those milestones and the personal pride we take in being able to help our customers become successful themselves above our own needs or wants.
For example, here are three case studies that really encapsulate how much difference we can make when we are engaged early enough to properly plan and implement a project or a programme.
Case Studies
Customer contacted The Project Bureau asking for support because they previously used their own technical team leads to deliver projects who were very competent, respected by their team members and dedicated to the company but they lacked the project management skills needed and they had just one their largest project to date with a budget of $8 million.
The company had completed their initial analysis their net profit on the project was estimated at 14.4% which they were completely happy with as they were a small company and this was significant income for them.
However when The Project Bureau took hold of the project, by renegotiating some of the contracts, implementing some strong project management rigour and carefully selecting the project delivery team from within the company’s resource pool. At the end of the project, the profit came in at 32.7%!
That’s right – simply by engaging The Project Bureau and allowing us to run the project properly, we increased profit by almost $1.5 million dollars – extra cash in their bank account that they never expected! Imagine how that helped a small company invest back into itself to expand it’s growth. Now it is one of the major players in its industry and has a defined project methodology, a PMO and trained project managers.
This customer was a start up who contacted The Project Bureau after winning a major deal to design and develop a prototype piece of technology. They said, “we are just engineers, we need someone to run the project properly” and the estimated value of this project was $1 million.
We conducted a workshop and did some further analysis and advised them that the value of the project was more like $4.5 million and we helped them to negotiate the contract at the higher rate and we made sure that the milestone payments were designed in such a way as to put the maximum amount of money in their bank account early to ensure funding was there to hire the right level of engineers. We designed it in such a way as the first milestone payment was higher than the originally thought budget which put more than a million dollars in their bank in the first couple of months.
This project is currently ongoing and we have successfully hit milestone 5 of 7 and each one of those milestones has been on time and met all the requirements so that no money has been withheld from the end client for any payment.
This is The Project Bureau difference.
Oh wait – did we tell you that The Project Bureau offers project and programme delivery at a firm fixed price (FFP)? Yes, that’s right, we are so confident in our ability to successfully deliver for you that we will take on the majority of the risk. Not only that, if you engage us early enough, we can design your project budget so that it will be an effective nil cost project management overhead.
Simple. Fair. The way it should be.
But what about the flip side? What if my project or my programme is already in trouble? Can The Project Bureau help us as well?
Yep – sure can. But rather than us just telling you we can, why don’t we give you another case study?
A major company contacted us to deliver a data centre relocation for them. A quote was provided but was deemed too expensive.
Remember we said how confident we are about our ability to deliver projects and programmes successfully? We were a little bit cheeky and said that’s fine, we can guarantee that you will find someone cheaper but the unfortunate fact is that you will be calling us back in about 9 months to support your project recovery.
Whilst it was an off the cuff comment made in good humour, exactly 9 months later they called back asking for help as the project manager they had engaged was costing them $250,000 per month in late fines, additional wages, pm fees and other costs. They asked if we could get them back in green within two months.
Sure thing. Not only did we get them back in green but delivered the entire project in only six weeks.
You wouldn’t have your company accounts managed by anything less than a chartered accountant and you wouldn’t undertake a major construction with anything less than a chartered engineer, so why settle for your projects and programmes to be led by anything less than a chartered project professional?
There is simply too much money at stake for your organisation to risk and this is your money. So de-risk it by engaging a chartered project professional.