CASE STUDY

The maturity assessment results have enabled UJ to refine its approach to monitoring the progress of critical projects, such as campus expansions, student residence upgrades and facility modernisations.

Addressing complex projects and reporting requirements

According to Greg James, Director of CTS, UJ, the CTS section he leads has a team of around 15 project managers and co-ordinators, as well as some external resources, including project managers and quantity surveyors – which looks after between 40 and 50 projects of varying sizes per year.

However, by 2018 we realised that a deeper analysis was required to ascertain how the project office measured up in terms of international best practices and standards,” he continued.

“ Having evaluated the maturity assessment offerings of several project management consulting companies, Project Portfolio Office’ s offering stood out not only because the team already understood our environment and unique circumstances, but also due to our requirements for a software-agnostic approach.

“ The value proposition was clear – to such an extent that we convinced our UJ procurement colleagues that our normal tendering process was not necessary – and decided to make use of Project Portfolio Office’ s maturity assessment service, as an extension of their existing services, to shed further light on where the gaps in our project maturity lay.”

From insight to action

“ Our projects span UJ’ s space, architecture and maintenance projects; ranging from smaller projects to large-scale undertakings funded collaboratively by the Department of Higher Education and Training and UJ. As part of UJ’ s Facilities Management side, we are required to report back to the Planning and Resources Committee of Council( PRCC), which reports to the main council and works in parallel with the Management Executive Committee, on our project progress four times per year.

“ And, as many of these projects involve a sizeable budget compared to certain other domains, there is a keen eye on how effectively our projects are being run and the progress being made on them.”

Laying the groundwork for project success

UJ’ s CTS project office initially adopted PPO on a smaller scale in 2016, based on the previous positive experience of the Advisor to the Vice Chancellor overseeing Facilities Management at the time. Over time, the CTS project office has systematically grown its use of the solution to cater for its increasing project management needs.

Professor Andre Nel, a prior Executive Director of Facilities Management at UJ and current Advisor in the office of the Chief Operating Officer( COO), recalled an initial maturity assessment completed by CTS early on.

“ The first maturity assessment was nothing more than a quick review of the PMO’ s capabilities, focused on the day-to-day operational elements of its PPO use.

The primary goals of this second maturity assessment were to:

• Evaluate current strengths and weaknesses throughout the project lifecycle

• Develop actionable recommendations for further improvement

• Co-create an improvement roadmap aligned with departmental goals and objectives

Following the assessment, CTS immediately launched a project to implement the key recommendations.

Guy Jelley, CEO and Co-founder of Project Portfolio Office, said:“ Maturity assessments are only valuable to projects offices if they act on the insights delivered. In the case of the CTS project office, instead of overlooking the crucial step of implementing the recommendations – as many PMOs do – they took swift action, launching a dedicated project immediately after receiving their PPO maturity assessment results and carefully selecting several recommendations to ensure their implementation.”

Post maturity assessment

“ In project management, especially within a university environment where workload is a constant challenge, it is difficult to objectively identify areas for growth and improvement,” clarified Nel.“ Having said this, we were initially surprised by the maturity assessment findings but also recognised that it was a valuable learning experience. The prioritised recommendations and roadmap put forward by Project Portfolio Office, which we then turned into achievable targets,

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