industry
Government
Key takeaways
- Removed disruptions
- Improved ownership
- Increased accountability
- Updated Insights reporting
An Australian Government agency responsible for delivering high-quality, accessible social, health and child support services and payments engaged Sensei to support its PMO.
The agency delivers support in a variety of ways including the provision of public health care such as covering the costs of basic GP visits, acquiring medicines and accessing mental health care. The agency also provides social welfare payments and support for childcare.
With so much in their remit, this agency needs to be nimble, able to seamlessly shift from task to task, project to project with minimal interference or delays.
Situation
Before engaging Sensei, the agency faced two challenges that limited its ability to manage projects and portfolios efficiently:
- With more than 5 million Australians relying on its services each year, the agency found itself constrained by status updates that required manager approval before they could be distributed or reported on.
- Risk ownership needed to be clearly and visibly accepted by the user who was assigned as the owner of the project.
Solution
To assist this agency with their approval process for status updates across the different business units, Sensei implemented an enhanced approval workflow that documented when and where updates were submitted and if they were approved or rejected, including the reason for each decision and the individual responsible. The new features included an update of Insights reporting to ensure only approved status reports were presented in final versions.
Regarding the issue of risk ownership, Sensei recognised the importance of clear risk ownership to reduce delays caused by limited accountability and follow-through. To help this agency achieve this, Sensei embedded an acceptance process into their PPM solution that included the comprehensive logging of acceptance or rejection of risk ownership and an associated comment to describe further actions to be taken to confirm or rectify the status of the risk assignment.
Outcome
By tailoring the PPM solution to the agency’s PMO requirements, Sensei improved the visibility, governance and accountability of project reporting and risk management. The agency provided overwhelmingly positive feedback during user review and testing, and the new capabilities are now being evaluated more broadly ahead of their full release.
