ViewPoint Insights

 

ViewPoint Insights

Consulting for growth ...

ViewPoint Insights

Providing assurance ...

Assurance

In order to become successful businesses and organisations become very good at the core of what it is that they do – the day-to-day running of their businesses and the focus on the services they deliver or products they create to meet market and customer need. However, almost all organisations at some stage have to develop and adapt to new regulatory regimes, or to adopt new and emerging technologies, or simply to reorganise themselves as part of a merger or acquisition, or finally to implement some form of an initiative through a programme of work. This then is often not core to what they do and all too often in the decision making process mistakes are made and programmes fail, sometimes with disastrous financial and reputational consequences. This has been seen time and time again in modern times and most organisations have suffered from a programme failure at some stage in their history.

Whilst failure can never be truly and completely eliminated you can nonetheless minimise the risk of failure and secure success by ensuring decision making in the context of a programme is robust and that risks are managed effectively and likely issues identified. One key aspect of this is ensuring you select the right business partners on the supply side and manage that relationship effectively and professionally. Another key aspect is ensuring the programmes goals are not overly ambitious or undeliverable and that you select the right technology and avoid unnecessary complexity.

ViewPoint Insights has extensive experience of providing assurance at the Board and programme level on complex programmes and can provide you with independent and objective decision support.

We can provide you with expertise and assistance in the following areas. Should any of these areas be of interest to you we will be more than happy to consult with you on how best we can tailor an approach to fit with your specific needs.

Assurance
Reviews

Building on our extensive experience we can assess your supply side proposals and delivery plans for appropriateness and examine their comparative strengths and weaknesses from both the cost and technical perspective. Choosing a supply side partner is a key decision moment in any programme and it is vitally important to get underneath and test the promises of a business partner ahead of commencement or the signing of any contract. We will place particular emphasis on any assumptions the supply side partner is making and how changes in those assumptions affect the nature of the deal. Additionally, resourcing from a supplier is often an area that needs testing to ensure that your programme is properly staffed with the right people at the right time. We will also examine your requirements documentation for appropriateness, as often it is here where things can go wrong in a programme at the very beginning. We would also want to assure your programme business case to ensure it is deliverable, affordable and well thought through having regard to the common pitfalls.

Governance
Reviews

It is vitally important to the success of any programme or project that it is governed and managed in an effective manner with efficient processes and reporting mechanisms such that sound decisions can be made independently and objectively. Culture starts at the top and flows down and through an organisation and accountability is incredibly important. Often the breakdown in people relationships and in communication can be a primary cause of failure. Good governance can help you avoid this common hazard. ViewPoint Insights can assess the robustness, and appropriateness, of your programme's governance arrangements and undertake a programme team's readiness assessment ahead of commencement. It is crucial to success that a client organisation is ready to receive and manage the supply side business partner and that programme risks are properly identified and managed. This can also be extended to conducting inflight reviews should a programme be hitting trouble. Accountability and transparency in delivering a complex programme is incredibly important. It is vital therefore that clear lines of accountability and reporting exist within your governance framework.

Lessons Learned
Reviews

When a programme fails, the value of conducting a lessons learned review cannot be overstated as providing a mechanism to effect real change in how an organisation approaches programme implementation. A deep assessment of the reasons why a programme failed and what can be done in the future to avoid the same pitfalls can provide an organisation with a tremendous opportunity to implement improvement opportunities. Using a tried and trusted approach of documentation review, interviews and workshops, ViewPoint Insights will get to the heart of what went wrong and make detailed recommendations tailored to your organisation to ensure best practice is embedded in your organisation and future failure avoided. It is often the case that those intimately involved in a failing project find it difficult to be objective and adopt standpoints that can prevent an organisation from really understanding the valuable lessons which can be learned and implementing them. The result can be that mistakes are repeated, money, time and resources are wasted.