Services
Agile Program & Project Management Office
While running your digital or ERP transformation, you need a team of charismatic chameleons taking care of your everyday project operation. Your eyes and ears on the ground, making sure you keep your headspace for vision and strategy. People who get the job done – in other words, “Pls fix” on steroids. We bring deep experience in setting up and running Program and Project Management Offices, including progress tracking and reporting, risk management, agile/SAFe and related tooling such as Jira/Confluence, Smartsheet and SAP Solution Manager.
What we do
We provide you with 360° coverage for all your Program and Project Management Office needs. Some of our key areas of expertise include:
- Independent Vendor Management
- Business Case & Value Realization Tracking
- Program Planning, Tracking & Reporting
- Quality Management
- Training & Enablement
- Organizational Change & Communication
- Agile Tooling Setup & Support
Even in times of increasingly widespread agile projects, the PMO is still an integral part of any initiative. Especially with several parallel Scrum teams or in hybrid agile projects, the PMO makes a significant contribution to the successful management of all projects. PMOs help increase project management maturity, define standards and promote communication. This organizational unit takes on a wide variety of tasks and is valuable for the goal-oriented management of all initiatives in a program.
As the hub for the flow of information, Avoras takes on the selection, implementation and optimization of relevant project management and project portfolio management tools. Challenges, such as reconciling strategic planning with team and budget planning, are successfully mastered through our best practices and many years of PMO expertise. We ensure that decision makers, project managers, department heads and controllers are involved at the right time and are able to impart knowledge and best practices.
We ensure that the PMO is positioned as central as possible in the program organization so that all project management tasks can be managed efficiently. With the help of our PRISM framework, we take a 360° look at the areas of application of a project management office and offer high-quality and tried and tested services.
From clarifying which tasks the PMO should take on to providing tools and work routines, we support you with the initial setup and optimization. For any flavour of agile solution delivery, we help you set up your PMO strategically, tactically and operationally.
In addition, our certified experts are available not only for the definition of an operating model for the PMO, but also for the successful operational implementation of your projects.
Case in point
Facilitating change
towards servant leadership
An industry leader in the Life Sciences sector was in the middle of ramping up their largest and most complex S/4HANA-based business transformation program to date, when an internal audit report recommended to transform the program towards agile.
To accelerate the adoption of these new ways of working, they requested our help with defining the right degree of agile and transforming the organization, including training of agile mindset, principles and practices to over 600 people.
Throughout the 12-month agile transformation roadmap, we trained senior executives to become servant leaders, moved the focus away from reporting output to delivering desired outcomes, and institutionalized new ways of working as well as a strong collaboration culture.
Our Capabilities
Value Cases & Program Setup
Justifying an investment in S/4HANA can be a daunting task; we see it as an opportunity to create anticipation and build buy-in from your leadership. A value case is structured into quantitative and qualitative aspects and needs to consider any cost (material or immaterial) of doing nothing. Over the years, we have developed a robust Value Case design framework:
- Assessment of As-Is process and solution KPIs, identification of pain points, opportunities and ambitions (e.g. through senior stakeholder interviews)
- Definition, sizing of value levers and description, alignment of high-level solution scope
- Customer value realization roadmap definition
- Costing & Benefit Model design, calculation of NPV based on IRR
- Senior stakeholder presentation
Depending on program scope and complexity as well as stakeholder availability, the framework can be executed in as little as 2 months. Please reach out to us for an approach tailored to your unique context.
Stakeholder Management, Change & Enablement
Finding it hard to deal with so many different stakeholders? We take everyone’s concerns into account, simplifying day-to-day communications and streamlining operations. We ensure that stakeholders are qualified to provide the right inputs and their feedback must be both varied and relevant. We promote frequent stakeholder relationship management activities so that work can be tackled before it becomes an issue, employing a stakeholder-centric strategy from top to bottom.
Program Planning, Reporting & Tracking
Planning, Tracking and Reporting are critically important Project Management pillars, and in many cases even decisive hygiene factors for the success of initiatives. Key success factors for a strong Planning, Tracking and Reporting process include the definition of a program plan and status report, the continuous alignment within an organisation and its leadership, as well as an experienced PMO team that can implement the required processes and governance on the basis of an easy-to-use toolset.
At Avoras we have specialised, highly experienced teams doing exactly that.
Independent Vendor Strategy & Management
As we are independent of large scale system integration vendors, we provide an unbiased view on vendor performance and vendor relationship management. Based on our experience in managing consulting resources as well as off- and near-shore development factories, we stand by your side when negotiating important contracts or defining KPI frameworks to track vendor risk management and plan adherence.
Last but not least, based on our experience of running numerous full-cycle ERP implementations, we provide an independent assessment of vendor proposals, approaches and solutions.
Jira & SAP Solution Manager Requirements & Setup
Your project tools landscape sits at the very core of your initiative and provides the basis for your team’s collaboration, documentation and work management. A common question is how to automate SAP®‘s Fit-to-Standard Assessment as much as possible: This includes overseeing and challenging the requirements management effort throughout the Design, Build, Test and Deployment lifecycle as well as the creation of user stories to define technical objects.
We bring extensive experience in setting up and defining requirements for project management software tools such as Jira, Confluence, Smartsheet, and others, thus enabling you to work seamlessly with your SAP® Solution Manager (CHARM and Focused Build). For your initiative, we define a work breakdown structure on the basis of Epics, Features and Stories and train your team on agile terminology and scalable change management procedures. We define tool use cases and identify best-of-breed tools (incl. any necessary Add-ons), define required issue types, workflows or custom fields for Jira, and align rules of engagement for the usage of Confluence.
Are you interested in sharing knowledge and learning more about some of the hard lessons we have learned when setting up tooling? Please contact us.
Our latest thinking
Charkris Ammann
Founder & Advisor
Kris has dedicated his career to digital transformation, foremost within Pharma and Life Sciences. He is specialized on program methodology and scaled agile in complex environments.
