The situation
There is work in the programme that has to be delivered and nobody to deliver it. A workstream with no lead. A programme office that does not exist. Suppliers nobody is holding to their statements of work. A deliverable with a date on it and a gap where the author should be.
The post is vacant. Filling it means advertising, appointing, onboarding and bringing someone up to speed, and that is assuming the specific skills are out there to hire at all. The date will not wait. What you need is the work done to a standard you can sign off, by people who do not need managing, starting in weeks.
We bring people who have done this before, and we lead them ourselves. You get the skill and the delivery discipline in one place, with the objectives agreed with you up front so everyone is working to the same definition of done. Managing them is our job, not another thing on your desk.
What we deliver
| Deliverable | What it answers |
|---|---|
| A programme or project office | Stood up from nothing: the plan, the RAID, the budget, the reporting rhythm and the people to run them |
| A workstream, end to end | One part of the programme taken off your hands and delivered to a date and acceptance criteria you set |
| A named deliverable | A business case, an options appraisal, a readiness assessment or an operating model, with a date and a definition of done |
| Programme or project leadership | A programme, project or workstream led to a defined outcome, reporting to your SRO |
| Supplier and statement of work management | The statements of work written, and the third parties held to what they signed |
The disciplines
Technical architecture, business analysis, test management, release management, change management and stakeholder engagement. Some of that is the two directors and some is associates we have worked alongside before. Either way it is our name on the deliverable.
The other five services are problems with a shape we already know. This is the one where you set the shape. Where the path forward is clear, this is scoped as a fixed delivery against milestones. Where it is not, and pretending otherwise would only produce a change request in month two, it runs on time and materials until the shape is known. We will tell you which one you are in.
An agency sells you a person by the day. You carry the delivery risk, you manage the work, and what you approve at the end of the month is a timesheet. This is a contracted-out service: we scope the work, resource it and lead it, and on a fixed delivery we carry the delivery risk under our own professional indemnity and what you approve is a deliverable rather than a timesheet.
What this looks like now
We are running one of these at a chartered professional body. One of our directors is in post as Interim Programme Director on its qualifications and professional development programme, accountable for delivery through the foundation phase: the transformation roadmap, the integrated plan and the RAID behind them.
The programme had no assurance function, so we built one — assurance types, approach, terms of reference, forward look and the reporting that follows it. Additional specialist resource is brought into the programme under defined work packages.
Tell us what’s on your desk.
If we are the right two people for it, we will say so. If we are not, we will say who is.
hello@votragroup.co.uk