Empowering internal project delivery for Queensland’s Indigenous education programme.

Client

Industry

First Nations Peoples, Public Sector, Education and training

Our Role

Uplift internal project management and delivery capability

Services

Project Management, Project Management Improvement

Overview.

Supporting and ensuring that “Every Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Student Succeeding”.

The Queensland Department of Education delivers world-class education services for Queenslanders at every stage of their personal and professional development. Queensland State Schools, Indigenous Education, sought a suitable consulting partner to provide coaching, mentoring and support services across project management , project management maturity and digital transformation to assist in delivery projects that contribute to the ‘Every Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Student Succeeding strategy‘.

PRINCE2 was the default project management methodology across Indigenous Education, however, suitable maturity levels in the use of PRINCE2 were not present and project managers are facing ongoing challenges in the execution, management and delivery of digital projects, which the business wanted to better understand and improve. The agency was unable to internally access digital coaching and mentoring and sought to engage an external organisation to provide the described services, in an expedient manner, via virtual, remote and (COVID safe) on-site methods.

Business need.

Maturity uplift and assessment of projects and their management across suite of digital projects.

Indigenous Education required a prompt maturity uplift and assessment of projects and their management/ delivery across the Every Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Student Succeeding strategy suite of digital projects.

This included specific evaluation across the key areas of business case development, delivery approaches, project management planning and readiness for financial assessments.

Indigenous Education required mentoring coach and support for its inflight project managers, delivered via one-on-one confidential coaching and mentoring and whole-of-branch information and training sessions, which needed to be fit-for-purpose and suitable for the Indigenous Education environment.

Challenges.

Suitable maturity levels in project management were not present with project managers facing ongoing delivery challenges.

Queensland State Schools, Indigenous Education was faced with the challenges of a significant immaturity across key areas of project management, which directly impacted their organisation’s ability to meet the challenges of digital transformation and the delivery of the department’s Indigenous programme.

These challenges included an inability to identify, frame and scope projects, align required project deliverables with departmental and agency specific strategies and difficulty in managing the progress of digital programmes and projects. The result of these challenges directly result in the inability for Queensland State Schools, Indigenous Education to secure programme and project specific funding to advance the digital transformation of services – which was seen as critical by the Queensland government.

Results.

Managed levels of project management capability powered by effective management tools, reporting processes and fit-for-purpose artefacts.

Project Management Improvement

PM Solutions worked in partnership with nine projects and the Queensland State Schools, Indigenous Education executive/ business owners to coach and support initiatives through the co-development of business cases and project initiation documents for critical projects seeking to access allocated funding.

The business owners and project leads were coached to successfully deliver robust business cases that clearly articulated detailed scopes of work, defined success criteria, high-level phased schedules (agile) and high- level engagement and adoption strategies. At the executive/ tactical level, PM Solutions supported leaders to develop and establish supportive management tools that included ‘management at a glance’ documents and ‘project-on-a-page’ artefacts.