P3O R Foundation certifications is suitable for individuals wanting to demonstrate they have sufficient knowledge and understanding of the P3O guidance to interact effectively with, or act as an informed member of, an office within a P3O model.
This certification is aimed at members of offices within a P3O model or anyone who needs to understand the terminology and concepts underpinning P3O and those wishing to pursue higher level certifications. The Foundation certification is also a pre-requisite for the Practitioner certification. It describes what a P3O is, defining the key types of P3O and goes on to answer the question posed by Senior Management - "why have P3Os and what value-add do they bring to the organisation?
And it includes checklists for start-up, continuous improvement, and reviving and closing down temporary offices. Also known as the P3O pocketbook. The book looks at the lifecycle of a P3O and describes the use of a project based approach to scoping and setting up a suitable P3O model within an organisation. The pocketbook introduces the principles, processes and techniques that will enable individuals and organizations to successfully establish develop and maintain appropriate support structures.
P3O R Foundation certifications is suitable for individuals wanting to demonstrate they have sufficient knowledge and understanding of the P3O guidance to interact effectively with, or act as an informed member of, an office within a P3O model. This certification is aimed at members of offices within a P3O model or anyone who needs to understand the terminology and concepts underpinning P3O and those wishing to pursue higher level certifications. Working with the senior management team, we agreed the need to drive change from the top of the organization and to incorporate governance of business change within the overall corporate governance framework.
It was agreed at the outset in April that the scope of any governance framework would exclude subsidiaries as these operate independently except where they require core Skipton Building Society or group resources. As illustrated in Figure 2, the transformation board reports into the senior management committee, which comprises the senior executive management team chaired by the chief executive.
The transformation board sits alongside the management boards responsible for operational management of the business. The portfolio office reports to the chair of the transformation board, who is the transformation director.
Alongside the transformation director, the membership of the transformation board consists of the group finance director an executive director with the company secretary as second representative for the central functions; the head of the retail board with the head of mortgage operations as a second representative for the retail board; and the chief information officer to represent IT.
Because structure was implemented as part of the transformation of the business and how it operates, we refer to what might have been called the portfolio board or investment committee as the transformation board.
Likewise the role of portfolio director is called the transformation director. Terms of reference for the transformation board were defined, agreed by the transformation board and approved by the chief executive.
These were then published alongside other corporate governance information under the auspices of the company secretary. In addition, as shown in Figure 3, we defined a five-gate investment management process, whereby project investments3 would be authorized by the transformation board at each gate, with resources people and funding allocated to the next gate.
The transformation board has the ability to reassess and authorize continuation of, or stop, a project at each gate. Submissions to the transformation board at each gate are appropriate evolutions of an investment case, increasing in detail to gate C and then focusing on outcomes and benefits at gates D and E.
Within this process, the transformation board is the escalation point for any issues that cannot be resolved by individual business owners4 and project boards, and the transformation board, in turn, escalates issues to the senior management committee.
The portfolio office supports and facilitates this governance framework, with the head of the portfolio office filling the role of secretary to the transformation board. Building on the existing business projects team, the portfolio office was established to explicitly support the governance framework. Therefore its functions follow directly from those required by the governance framework. The functional structure of the portfolio office is shown in Figure 4. Business owner is the title given to a senior responsible owner within Skipton Building Society.
As per the governance framework, the portfolio office does not directly cover subsidiary companies, which are run as independent businesses but do sometimes use Skipton Building Society resources.
Due to the size of the organization circa staff within the main office and the relatively low level of maturity with respect to programme and project management, we incorporated project delivery resources project managers and business analysts within the structure. In addition, as Skipton Building Society had a particular issue with large volumes of small-scale changes to core operational systems, a specific change request management function was incorporated into the structure.
Project support and resourcing were essentially existing functions within the previous business projects team. Investment management, performance management and portfolio reporting functions had to be built from scratch, along with the change request management capability. The implementation of the portfolio office was carried out in a series of tranches or stages in line with P3O guidance, but based on a mix of priorities for the portfolio office and the ability to recruit and develop the staff.
The approach is outlined in Figure 5, showing an evolution in three tranches over a 9—12 month period, with significant progress by Q4 The initial focus was on getting control of in-flight projects and enabling the transformation board to start assessing the most urgent new projects. One of the key issues in setting up a portfolio office is the resourcing of the portfolio office itself and assessing the necessary mix of roles, capabilities and capacity. Our approach was based on assessing the functions, the volume of work and capabilities available, in line with the approach outlined in the P3O guidance section 3.
Figure 6 outlines the portfolio office jobs and staff. Of these, the head of the portfolio office and investment manager roles were the most significant. The scope of the head of portfolio office role dictated the use of external consulting and interim staff to drive forward, although the support and engagement of the incumbent head of business projects was critical in the transition.
For the investment manager role we were able to recruit internally for a finance manager who already had experience of building business cases for corporate acquisitions and disposals.
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