Our Services

Project Governance and Assurance

Once you have mobilised your team to deliver the project mission, the contractual relationships between those firms will define the project organisation structure and set its direction. But you, as the client, retain important responsibilities towards the project coalition throughout the life cycle, and we can provide independent oversight and guide you through your multiple roles of:

• Promoter – defining the need for the project and ensuring that it meets that need.
  
• Financier – obtaining the capital required to finance the project and then controlling it.
  
• Decision-maker – to push the project through the life cycle (or kill it!).
  
• Recruiter – mobilising the most appropriate and capable firms to deliver the project.
  

Client Representation

Your responsibilities as a project promoter, financier, decision-maker and recruiter are onerous, and not every organisation has the organisational capability to fulfil such roles. Indeed, many of our clients may only make a significant investment in business infrastructure intermittently and so cannot justify the overhead of an in-house project management capability.

In this situation, we can support you, as a partner within your project organisation, to ensure that decisions are taken that can only enhance the intended project benefit.

Procurement Strategy and Management

David Somerville and Linda Cook are accredited procurement advisors, each having completed a New Zealand Certificate in Infrastructure Procurement Procedures. This is a level-6 NZQA qualification that is mandatory for at least one of the tender evaluation team on NZTA projects valued over $200,000. Many councils have already adopted this requirement within their procurement procedures.

This qualification allows them to advise or act in confidence for clients during any procurement activity, in compliance with the Government Rules of Sourcing.

How we can help you in procurement:

• Writing robust Procurement Plans that progress through a logical sequence to determine the preferred method of tendering and evaluation.
• Preparing tender documents.
• Managing the tender process including managing all correspondence and briefings with bidders.
• Forming evaluation teams and managing the evaluation process through to award of contract.

Risk Management

While the procedures of traditional project ‘risk’ management remain relevant, we believe their use needs to be rethought so that they avoid the threat of the tick-box mentality that reduces effectiveness in identifying threats and opportunities and creates a false sense of security by presenting probabilistic calculations as facts rather than clear judgments.

Rather than project ‘risk’, we prefer to evaluate project ‘uncertainty’, because it represents conditions where objective probabilities are not available, and therefore better reflects the difference between the information required by a decision-maker for a decision and the information available to the decision-maker for that decision.

How we can help you in Risk Management

• Facilitating risk management workshops.
• Reviewing and testing project or programme risks.
• Helping you to manage significant risks through proactive strategies.