Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Advisory Services

Service Overview

Many organisations look to drive service transformation and cost efficiencies through cloud hosting and software services, and wider digital initiatives, but fail to achieve expected operational and customer service benefits or RoI because of shortfalls in how they:

Our Advisory Services develop these fundamental planning and governance capabilities within an organisation. We assess current project and portfolio capabilities from a people/process/technology perspective and benchmark these against our own reference models. We design practical target frameworks that will resolve identified gaps, and work within our Customers’ organisation to implement and embed sustainable processes that ensure effective planning and delivery of digital transformation.

Our expertise comes from both theoretical and practical experience of delivering such projects ourselves; managing complex portfolios through their lifecycle from business case, through design and delivery, to live service and user adoption. Our breadth of advisory expertise encompasses:

In addition to providing governance frameworks that empower our Customers to plan and implement digital transformation solutions, we are also able to independently and impartially review in-flight projects and, where appropriate, recommend remedial actions or provide “hands on support” to bring them back on track.

Ease of Engagement

We recognise that engaging with a new services partner for the first time requires an investment in time and effort from both parties. However by approaching this in a structured way, we quickly get to know your organisation, your team, your processes and how you like to work, so that we can share this insight with any of our team who may subsequently work with you. Our approach enables us to quickly become a trusted member of your team, something evidenced through our track record with many customers where we have been engaged on an initial piece of advisory work and subsequently expanded our scope to encompass further advisory and operational delivery assignments.

Scoping Requirements

We always make sure that we have explored, understood and documented our Customer’s requirements and expectations as thoroughly as practically possible. We reflect these back in a formal scope of engagement, which will set out our Customer’s requirements, our deliverables, any assumptions we have made, the roles and expectations of both parties, and the commercial framework for delivery and charging. This documentation serves as a baseline for the engagement.

We also recognise that requirements change over time, and so we are always prepared to flex and adapt, managing this through formal scope change control.

We find that the earlier we are engaged in the business change lifecycle, the better we can scope our Customers’ requirements, helping them to accurately shape plans, budgets and resource forecasts.

Bio Portfolio and Project Management as a Service (PPMaaS)

Service Overview

Our PPMaaS provides modular project and programme governance and strategic portfolio management services, helping our Customers successfully deliver digital transformation and business change. We deliver these as “hands on” operational services, with our experienced project, programme and portfolio managers either working within our Customers’ own teams to provide additional capacity or expertise, or delivering full, outcomes based turnkey project, programme or portfolio management.

Our expertise comes from a combination of industry best practice methodology, formal training and certification, and practical experience of delivering such projects ourselves across a wide range of Customer environments; managing complex portfolios through their lifecycle from business case, through design and delivery, to live service and user adoption.

Our breadth of delivery encompasses:

We dovetail with our Customer’s team and environment, and are equally at home adopting their processes, documentation and frameworks, or bringing our own standard and proven methodologies and templates into the engagement where this can add further value.

We also provide highly flexible resource models – including "fractional" pay as you use, where our Customers can turn their consumption of our services up and down by the hour, in the same way as they flex their compute power up and down in a cloud model.

Example Case Study

The deployment of flexible resourcing models to underpin variable project workload

Bio were engaged by an organisation in the legal sector with a view to providing project management capacity for 8 months to support the delivery of a number of key IT projects within a business change and cloud migration programme.

The IT function had an individual with project management skills, but with very limited capacity this was constraining progress, potentially delaying the delivery of business critical platforms and systems. They were considering bringing in a contractor to support the “in-house” Project Manager, however having reviewed the portfolio of planned work with Bio, it quickly became apparent that the workload would peak and trough significantly during the year. In most months an additional fixed term contract resource would be under-utilised, incurring cost for “white space”, and yet without the additional resource, the in-house team would be unable to meet demand.

Bio recommended a “flex model”, whereby the capacity of project management delivered could increase or decrease to match demand, measured and recorded on 15 minute intervals. Bio would only charge for the hours consumed each day, delivering 100% utilisation compared to a ‘straight line’ day rate engagement of a contractor equivalent.

Across the 8 month duration, Bio’s service cost was over 50% less in total compared to the alternative cost of a contractor for the same 8 month duration.

This initial engagement led to multiple further assignments, spanning IT projects, business change, and even managing the post acquisition integration of another organisation.