A contributory, and yet vital, component of the overall service is that of requirements engineering. We are confident that the VOLARE Methodology is an effective module for the elicitation, representation and management of the overall Programme/Project Management Approach.

This then represents the three pillars that underpin our range of specific project-related services that we offer our clients:
1. Best-practise Project Management coupled with the procedural strength of Prince 2.
2. A Programme Management Methodology that incorporates the approach to project management and can be applied to Strategic Programme Formation or a more tactical amalgamation of related projects.
3. The VOLARE requirements engineering methodology.

The services derived from the above include programme and project management as well as requirements engineering. However we also offer short-term tactical services including:

 The Product Realisation Process
 Process Mapping
 Business Viability Analysis
 Portfolio Management
 Cost Management and Reduction
 New Product Development Review
 Quality Status Reporting
 Quality Management Update
 Project Phase Review
 Project Health Check

Recent Clients:
Carellience, Eindhoven, Holland.
East Midlands Electricity, Nottingham
Elekta, Crawley, Sussex,
Sita, Geneva, Switzerland
Underwriters Laboratory USA
IEE, London,
Lago Systems, Brighton
Christie Hospital, Manchester
CronerCCH, Kingston,
Thales, Crawley,
Active Navigation, Southampton
MOD. Sutton Coldfield
Prudential. London and Reading
Reuters, London

Below we provide a very broad-brush overview of the components that make up the best-practice project management model:

1. The Business or Technical Problem / Opportunity is the reason why the project is set up or continues to exist. It should be represented as a simple verifiable statement. Problems arise when the organisation is unable to state or agree on what the problem / opportunity statement is and this is a major indicator that the project is not well defined and therefore achieving project success will be very difficult.

2. The Project Objective describes the completion statement. The project will be closed down when this has been achieved. It should be a simple sentence that is more than just a reworded problem statement, it should describe the changes that are required to solve the business problem. Organisations that try to manage projects that do not have a well-formed project objective will have great problems in realising business benefits and achieving effective project closure.

3. Critical Success Factors are 5-9 critical project outcomes, the failure of any one of which will lead to total project failure. CSFs can be derived from risk analysis or the breakdown of the contributory factors that underpin the project objective. An understanding of the CSFs provides an ongoing management agenda, this simple, but often overlooked, fact is that the CSFs. By definition, are the most important aspects of the project and therefore should always be highly visible to management and stakeholders.

4. Project Deliverables are the strictly defined and quality controlled outcomes of the project activities. We recommend the use of PRINCE2 to provide a formal framework within which to efficiently manage the creation of all deliverables.

5 Business Requirements are the highly structured collection of statements that link the business problem opportunity with the project deliverable. Only requirements that contribute to the business problem/opportunity must be in scope while every project deliverable must relate to one or more business requirement. The VOLARE methodology provides a complete and compatible approach for the elicitation and management of the business requirements.

6. Business Benefits are created by the deployment of technical project deliverables. Our approach recognises only three types of business benefits:
a) increasing profitability by increasing revenue above costs or decreasing costs without disproportionately reducing revenue;
b) strategic – usually relating to achieving a competitive advantage;
c) the provision of management information that will enable the organisation to achieve benefits type a or b at some time in the future.

7 Project Costs relate to the cost of producing project deliverables; the cost of realising business benefits and the cost of mitigating or combating project or business risk.

8 Project and Business Risk is the final top level component in the best-practise model. The management of risk derives from an understanding of the structure of the project. The usual breakdown would encompass specific project risk, business risk, technology risk, market risk, etc.

Each of the eight components described above interact, directly or indirectly with others and each can be broken down to conceptually lower levels of detail.

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mgreenwell