Governance & Business Cases

All change projects are difficult – and information systems projects are especially challenging. Most can only claim partial success and many go wrong from the outset. Those projects that succeed owe that to a number of critical factors but, at the heart, every successful systems project needs good governance and an honest business case. The problem for organisations in the sector is that structured decision-making and the detailed pre-planning are unfamiliar for many and culturally hard to implement for most.

Adapta consultants have all worked extensively in or with charities, membership bodies and others in the sector. We understand the different cultures and our teams are skilled in introducing the right balance of control and consensus to each engagement. We work with you to establish an appropriate governance structure for the help we provide – so that you can manage our involvement with confidence but also so that we can demonstrate by example how any project needs to be established and controlled.

We refer to all our projects as “engagements” – and that’s because we believe that roles, relationships and clear communication are crucial to achieving success. So, even before we start work with you, we will ask to establish an appropriate project governance framework and the associated key roles (sponsor, project manager, stakeholders and so on). We draw on our library of template terms of reference, reporting frameworks, and other project components to help us and we combine those to achieve the most appropriate mix for your project and your organisation. And we’ll help you set all that up.

One of the most important components can often be the business case for change. We have templates and structures approaches for that as well but, more importantly, our consultants are trained and experienced in helping your teams articulate the needs and the risks – and we can help put those into the right format from senior management / trustee approval; or to convert the business case to a proposal for external funding.

The consultants we propose for governance and business case engagements are all experienced professionals many of whom have held senior management positions in the sector. We know what goes wrong when projects don’t have a firm foundation in governance, and we know how to embed that without undermining the important cultural and other principles in your own organisation.

Not every change project needs a business case – and those that do don’t always need the same level of detail. Our consultants have real experience of what works and what doesn’t and we bring that to share with you in the challenges you face.