Program Management & Governance Strategy

Business Case:

A Fortune 500 Consumer Packaged Goods Manufacturer was in the process of consolidating all manufacturing operations to a single facility in Richmond, Virginia.   In order to ensure that manufacturing operations disruptions were limited, enhancements to the production operations and IT landscape were required in the Richmond facility.  

New high speed equipment was purchased or imported from other facilities prior to decommissioning.   A new IT landscape was planned in order to drive visibility, efficiency, and improved decision making throughout all operational areas of the manufacturing plant.   Significant facilities changes were required for business continuity and disaster recovery, including data center redundancy and failover and network and power redundancy inside and outside the factory.

The Manufacturing Systems Framework (MSF) Program was established in order to manage the overall effort.   The Program consisted of nine mobilized work streams responsible for the improvements to operations and IT infrastructure.   

Solution: 

Historically, the client had managed IT-related efforts at the project level and had limited knowledge of program management strategies and execution models.  CapTech consultants were requested to establish the program management and governance strategies.   CapTech consultants analyzed the work stream structure and developed a Program Management Office responsible for governing the program’s schedule, scope, resources, and budget against the expected timeline.   

CapTech partnered with the client to create a program level infrastructure toolkit, including: 

  • Communications infrastructure consisting of weekly program status reporting across all work streams, including the creation of executive level reporting communication templates
  • Change control and risk / issue / dependency escalation procedures to ensure scope management
  • Integrated program schedules for task level planning and work stream milestone dependency management
  • Integrated program budget and financial tracking tools to ensure that work stream capital and expenses were forecasted against the program budget
  • Benefits realization templates and procedures to track realized and projected program benefits against the initial business case
Results: 
  • The Program infrastructure, tools, and templates originally developed for the MSF Program were also adopted by the corporate Portfolio Management Office and became the standard infrastructure toolkit for all enterprise programs.
  • The Program infrastructure ensured visibility into schedule, scope, and budget across all work streams and assisted in the delivery of the first three releases on schedule and under budget.
  • Even though the initial business justification for the project was not driven by ROI, the benefits templates and procedures realized nearly $10M in program costs savings and/or cost avoidance.