Programme Acceleration Hub (Media)

Bringing the organisation together for a common goal

The Client

FTSE100 international media company.

The Engagement

To reduce project development timelines across a number of business units while also delivering significant cost savings:

To save the business approximately £25m in project development costs.
To shrink project development timelines from five months to six-eight weeks.
To increase positive collaboration across disparate parts of the business and redefine ways of working from accounting and data control to marketing and recruitment.

The Complexity

Due to the size and complexity of the organisation, cross-functional team working had become challenging and cumbersome, impacting on project timelines: an unsustainable situation.

There was only a three-month time frame in which to deliver this, and 200 stakeholders needed to be involved. This would require a condensed, accelerated approach whilst ensuring minimum impact on day-to-day business.

Design and Delivery

Extensive interviews were conducted in ad- vance across all teams and with senior team members in order to design a custom-made process that would deliver the requisite results in a short timeframe.

In response to the stretching objectives, and due to the sheer number of stakeholders in- volved from across the business, our diagnosis was the need for multiple large-scale interventions with acceleration at their core. These would process up to 60 people at a time through an on-site Transformation-Hub facility for an intense, collaborative, outcomes-focused experience.

From the initial brief and in only eight weeks, Innovation Arts was able to move from the initial qualification and scoping stage of the process through to planning and agreeing content for a series of eight DesignSessions, and then their implementation across the business.

Each DesignSession was bespoke to the business issue it served. Session approaches varied, but each was based upon design thinking and featured modelling, iteration, self-directed teams and parallel processing, with continuous facilitation provided by the Innovation Arts team. The permanent Innovation Arts team included not only highly skilled facilitators, but also experienced graphic recorders and project managers who were able to drive the session agenda and content while capturing ideas, strategies and outcomes through visual recording, infographics and infomurals.

The on-site T-Hub, with its fully equipped permanent collaborative environment, provided the means to deliver repeatable sessions for not only planning, but also to build alignment and commitment across the wider organisation.

Results

The development of new vision, objectives, goals & strategies for teams.
Identification of misalignment amongst teams & corrective action.
Creation of robust implementation plans.
Shared objectives for new project developments.
Stakeholders for projects, both implementers and budget holders, were engaged throughout the projects’ development. This ensured that outcomes were robust and sponsorship assured from the outset.
New ‘one-team’ approach and alignment achieved. Due to the high levels of success observed by other teams, the Innovation Arts’ T-Hub approach was requested by an additional eight project teams from across the business to solve their own programme challenges.

Deliverables

A well-documented new approach that would underpin sustained acceleration and cost reduction.
A toolkit for ongoing development, based on leading practices in programme management.

“This is a completely new way of looking at things - it has been invaluable for us. This programme worked by bringing together stakeholders who thought differently to face a common goal.”-Programme Delivery Director