The supplier had signed up to a major new deal where transition/transformation needed to be completed within 18 months or the impact on the clients business would be massive. Consequently there were large contractual penalties.
The supplier had undertaken a 3 month exercise to plan out the transition/transformation. They had worked from the end date backwards to fit in all the necessary activities. De-RISK were introduced to do a SDA Timescale risk assessment which took 2 days. This predicted that the likely duration of the programme was not 18 months but 30 months.
The Transition/Transformation teams undertook a re-structuring exercise which looked at how resourcing could be shifted to perform more activities in parallel. The re-vamped plans were much improved but still showed a likely delay of 7 months. However, there were 15 key assumptions that, if managed, would effectively remove the 7 month delay. A Joint Risk Review Board was set up and met monthly with its focus being on managing these assumptions. The analysis was repeated at 3 month intervals to update and capture any new assumptions. All assumptions were rigorously managed to ensure that delays were mitigated and opportunities taken and the Transformation programme was ultimately completed 2 weeks ahead of schedule.
“The one thing we would do differently is to do a SDA analysis earlier”