Overall Project Management – Stopping the Flood of Projects and Focusing Energy on the Market

Client Challenge

When our client assumed his new position as CEO of a multinational wholesale company with an annual sales volume of nearly €1 billion, he was confronted with a flood of ongoing projects, project proposals and special issues within the organization. There were no rules as to who was allowed to initiate projects and thus commit resources; there was no transparent reporting on progress and results, and duplication of effort was the order of the day.

Mandat Intervention

We worked with the CEO to develop a “meta-project” aimed at achieving full transparency and controlling the relevant projects and resources in our client’s company.

We personally interviewed all four managing directors and the approximately 12 division heads in order to document the projects under their purview. The initial situation, purpose, objectives, project structure, schedule, previous successes and current bottlenecks were quickly identified.

We created a project landscape in our management studio in Dortmund that showed on large-format plots where duplication of effort was occurring, which projects had already been running for an excessively long time, where project conditions, results and statuses were unclear and which departments had high concentrations of projects.

We moderated a number of strategic and tactical workshops for the entire management team in order to achieve a new, streamlined, market-oriented and realistic project landscape.

Together, we defined rules as to what character a project must have in order to be designated as a project and who was entitled to initiate projects and thus to commit resources.

We developed an easy-to-implement procedure that enabled the company to obtain first-hand information on the status of key projects. We also developed a company-wide standard for the design, execution and completion of projects and for knowledge retention of project results.

Results

Approximately 50% of more than 70 ongoing projects were immediately discontinued because they neither created any significant value nor showed any discernible progress, or because the issues they dealt with were already being addressed in several other different places within the company. Time saved: 30 person-years.

The freed-up capacities were used to provide significant support to promising market-oriented projects or to make major improvements to important routine processes.

The report on key projects became an integral part of management meetings. Project execution speed was increased by up to 50%.

Investments were pooled, targeted and made available to the most effective and promising projects – and not just to the projects that were shouting loudest, as was previously the case.

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