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Management of Major Projects

Sia Partners supports its clients in the management of large end-to-end programs, with a methodological approach at the heart of innovation. We have at our disposal multidisciplinary expertise, proven on large-scale projects.

Success Stories

"Tracking at 110% of estimated financial benefits"

"IT delivery has increased by 30% using the agile approach"

Where we Started

Our client is one of the largest general insurance companies in Ireland. It employs approximately 1,500 people and has a million customers. It is part of a larger group that has over 80 million customers in 70 countries worldwide.

Our client embarked on a digital transformation programme. This involved moving from a legacy delivery approach to an ‘agile’ approach and the introduction of product management to drive agile technology delivery.

The Challenges

The leadership team felt the pace of change within the organisation was too slow to react to customer demand and its competitors.

New initiatives took many months or even years to deliver impacts; visibility on return on investment was difficult to measure and there was an ever-increasing gap between the needs of the business and its capacity to deliver. To address these issues, our client embarked on a digital transformation programme. This involved moving from a legacy delivery approach to an ‘agile’ approach and the introduction of product management to drive agile technology delivery.

What We Did

Working closely with senior executives, our team worked across the organisation to create an ‘agile enterprise’. We stopped projects that would not deliver benefits and re-allocated capacity to high-impact work. We reshaped the prioritisation and selection of business initiatives to align with company strategy. IT was transitioned from a waterfall to an agile development team delivering on-demand and synchronizing on a quarterly cadence.

We worked alongside our client and took direct responsibility for the first high-impact project, which focused on the Claims Fraud Team and delivered benefits months ahead of expectations, using lean design and agile delivery principles. Finally, we worked with the organisation to hire, re-train and coach staff to support the new ways of working.

The Outcomes

The project was completed on time and within budget and is currently tracking at 110% of estimated financial benefits. IT delivery has increased by 15% using the agile approach. The agile management team established to deliver the first high-impact project has served as a template for the creation of further agile teams delivering benefits to a wider transformation programme. A key benefit of this project was the demonstration of how product management and agile delivery could improve benefit realisation across the company.

When one of the UK’s largest retailers undertook a significant programme creating a brand new standalone bank, we were employed as programme managers – leading the implementation of the required change and working with the bank’s teams in Edinburgh.

The challenge

With a range of products including insurance, credit cards, loans, savings, current accounts and mortgages and a forecasted significant service delivery online and via call centres, the focus of our work was to enable our client to establish its own banking teams, processing systems, operations centres, distribution channel and products all in sync not just in the basic infrastructure but culturally.

What we did

We were the lead programme execution partner for a number of programmes including; General Insurance, Finance, Treasury and Enterprise Management Information continually working with senior staff as well as operational teams to ensure a seamless platform switch.

The outcome

All related business functions and service offers that were led by our team were launched on schedule and on budget, with zero service disruptions.

Where we started

When the second-largest pharmaceutical organisation in the world chose our client as the outsource partner for a drug trial, it demanded that our client provide full transparency of all related activities. This meant total integration of systems in the two diverse organisations. We led this challenge on behalf of our client.

The challenges

This programme was the biggest customer-facing IT project ever executed by our client. It involved dealing with multiple suppliers and internal business and IT teams. The challenge was further exacerbated as it was executed in parallel to the transition of the trials activity to our client, a massive project in its own right. It introduced high level of complexity across the programme in terms of the technical solution and the programme organisation.

What we did

We started with a four-week detailed diagnosis and planning exercise which resulted in programme reorganisation, declaration of clearly defined scope and a number of changes in personnel on the programme. Once we were satisfied that we have right programme structure we commenced a detailed planning exercise which resulted in grounded and realistic delivery dates which were committed to by all stakeholders. In parallel, we established new management and governance practices and worked closely with the Business Transition team to ensure IT and process changes were fully coordinated.

The outcome

The project went live on schedule with a real time transparent view of the daily trial data supported by performance metrics.