The Goal

The goal of this project was to ensure that every former health region was providing project status reports into the portfolio reporting tools. The existing process was not working, and it had to be reinvented to ensure timely portfolio reporting and ministry of health reporting. Not being able to provide timely reports would mean missing information on the budget, total spend and to forecast cash flows.

Project Challenge

There were no formal documents to define the process and terms associated with the process. Stakeholders were involved, and the work standards were created and circulated to impacted people. Training and coaching was provided to mitigate this challenge.

Project Challenge

Everybody was looking at the process in isolation. The finance department wanted it based on their schedule and the capital and infrastructure department had different goals. Even the way various terms were defined was different in different departments. To ensure consistent reporting to the Ministry of Health, it was essential to report similar numbers for projects, budget, and spend. We helped create one source of information and produced a single report.

The Goal

This project, meant to modernize and refresh the central legislative building downtown, was stalled for a year and a half. We quickly discovered there wasn’t even a project plan in place. Despite this, the previous project manager called an architect only to have her quit after the initial stages of the design work. This project needed a serious recovery effort, and we got the call to come clean it up.

Project Challenges

The dome had hadn’t been touched in over a hundred years (literally, since 1908). Since then, there had been piecemeal attempts to keep it functional; but the dome was in disrepair. The copper roof was leaking, and the stone was crumbling. It was so bad that they had installed nets to catch falling stones, some weighing over a thousand pounds.

The copper needed to be replaced and refurbished. This was difficult because it takes a specifically skilled artisan to handle this type of work, which was lacking in Saskatchewan. Additionally, all of the surrounding stone was made of a rare kind of limestone, only found in one part of the world. After a thorough investigation, we determined that it was the rare Tyndall Stone found in Tyndall, Manitoba. Again, we were left without qualified talent as no local tradesperson could do that type of masonry work.

The Goal

The goal of the project was to develop a new water supply system sourced 70 km away from the mine site. The raw water supply was critical to the mine because it would provide the water needed to extract the potash using a solution process. Failure of the project would put the entire operation of the mine at risk.

Project Challenge

Implementing the risk approach involved integrating three separate systems: the raw water portion of the mine, the mine development program, and Vale’s corporate risk management approach. We had to work with the client and implement risk workshops to develop a common understanding of how risk management would be carried out. We used an in-room risk management facilitation approach to the workshop to identify risks. From there, we were able to apply best practices to analyze the risks, assign risk owners, monitor the risks, and implement responses.

Project Challenge

With the three disparate entities, all with their own operational biases, we had to take a collaborative coaching approach to all levels of the organization. Without adopting this approach, the risk management methodology would have failed, and risk would have reached an unacceptable level.

The Goal

We helped transition several operational areas (project delivery groups, operations, and maintenance groups) into new operating procedures. This work includes diagnostic, solution design, process re-engineering, value management, risk management, and training. Successfully implementing the change would allow the organization to deliver more value to the organization, government, and ultimately, the taxpayers. The client had been hesitant to work with consultants due to poor outcomes in past experiences. We had to focus heavily on team building to establish trust so our interventions would be applied.

Project Challenges

The Health Authority had zero experience with value management. We used value management best practices frameworks and associated tools/techniques such as FAST, value engineering, and process re-engineering, all of which were foreign to the SHA staff. It took a careful, people-centric approach to apply these foreign practices. If done poorly, other consultants may have had a tough time creating positive outcomes. They would have likely brought in pre-built, in-house, proprietary solutions and forced them on the client without applying proper coaching and change management techniques.