Management Consulting Icon

Practice Area

Management Consulting

Project Management Consulting is one of our core specialties starting with establishing a Project Management Office, Portfolio and Program Management, Agile Transformation, Waterfall or Custom Hybrid Methodologies, Business Analytics, Organizational Transformation and Change Management.

Our project management and business consultants have successfully implemented a wide range of projects from enterprise-wide to small project initiatives for private and public sector.

With our engagements, our goal is to provide value to your organization, using a variety of methodologies, analytics, and techniques to start the engagement on the right track or to come in and rescue the project to a successful implementation.

A listing of our current services include:

  • Portfolio and Program Management
  • Agile Transformation
  • PMO Services
  • Scrum, Kanban, and Lean methodologies
  • Custom Hybrid Methodology Development & Implementation
  • Organizational Transformation and Change Management
  • Business and Data Analytics
  • Agile Coaching

Practice Area Lead

Practice Area Lead Profile Image

Felix Carballo

Project Management Director

felix@agilifyus.com

Connect on LinkedIn

+1 225-362-9213

Our Current Project Engagements &
Key Highlights

One of the flagship projects for Agilify is establishing the Portfolio and Project Management Office (PPMO) for the Louisiana Department of Health (LDH). Our team is currently working with the executive leadership and stakeholders to set up a Portfolio and Project Management Office (PPMO), that serves to provide guidance, best practice standards and a governance structure to all the project performed by Louisiana Department of Health. The focus of this engagement has also been to move from traditional project management approach to more Agile and Lean way of doing things, where processes are flexible and quick to adapt to changes and value is delivered incrementally and much early in the life of the project.

With just over 2 years into this engagement, there has been a drastic increase in the number of projects getting completed on time and meeting compliance standards as well, to get the funding from Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS). There is more visibility into key metrics and the management is able to make much more informed decisions and hence be more pro-active, as opposed to be reactive to changing situations. The result is that over 1.7 million Medicaid and over 0.88 million Medicare enrollees are getting access to the much-needed healthcare services in a much efficient manner.

Agilify is currently partnering with MMR Group, an electrical engineering company based in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Together, we are developing a construction management system in the form of both a Web Application and Mobile Application to manage key business operations and financials in one system.

As a result of our partnership, the benefits will be far reaching. MMR Group had revenue of over $608M in 2020 and has a footprint in over 35 countries across 4 continents. A few of the key benefits that will impact the global operations are as follows:

  • One system to manage and track key information for Training, Safety, Quality, Labor and Equipment
  • Efficiencies related to daily labor tracking and equipment allocation on domestic and international job sites
  • Rules engine to account for complex Federal and Stage overtime rules, as well as employee per diem rates
  • Rules engine to account for complex-contract specific billing needs such as taxes, mark-ups and freight
  • Key real-time metrics for Executive leadership and clients
  • Accessibility to key data for internal and external auditing purposes

In addition to developing the Web and Mobile applications, Agilify is also implementing an Agile approach to managing the Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC). Within the first 6 months of the Construction Management System project, this methodology proved its value as the project team was able to make critical changes to the software functionality based on significant decisions made by MMR leadership.

Lastly, the benefits of the partnership between Agilify and MMR Group will not end at the time of project completion. The methodology for managing the SDLC for which Agilify has introduced, trained and helped to implement is one that will provide MMR Group’s IT Division the ability to meet operational and strategic objectives as MMR Group continues to grow and realize annual revenues approaching or exceeding $1B.

Agilify has partnered with the Louisiana Office of Technology Services (OTS), the information technology arm of the State of Louisiana tasked with consolidating and managing IT services within state agencies. With this partnership, Agilify is providing a major role in the development of an enterprise governance framework and tactical management of the OTS Enterprise Architecture Shared-Services platform. This framework will allow the State to drive vision and business strategy for the Enterprise Architecture platform and provide focused product ownership to the following enterprise technology areas:

  • Content Management
  • System Integration Management
  • Identity Management
  • Data Management
  • Process Automation

In Addition, Agilify is also working with OTS to execute a distributed Enterprise Change Management framework consisting of a single enterprise change group and multiple agency-level change groups. Our team of expert change managers is charged with holistically overseeing the enterprise change management framework, executing the change management processes for enterprise and agency level changes, coordinating change impact analysis, and making final decisions on enterprise change deployment schedules.

Our Success Story

The Situation

Portfolio and Project Management Office (PPMO) Strategy

One of our current clients, a large government entity, needed a PPMO to manage the project and programs. There was a big push within the client organization to move towards Lean and Agile methodology and hence a change from the traditional approach and way of doing things.

This massive undertaking involved not only several workstreams and departments, but also other state agencies and vendors. This was a multi-year project for Agilify and we worked hand in hand with the client’s senior leadership to provide them the support and help needed to achieve the key goals. The keys performance metrics included, building out a governance structure for portfolio and project management office (PPMO), to have a robust mechanism for strategic alignment as well as risk and resource management for all the projects. Another key metric was to have proper change control in place for any project related process change and to have a traceability of that change implementation after the approval process. Lastly, there was also a need to have project schedules and associated reports to get a real time access into project schedule health analysis.

The Action

We established a PPMO and staffed it with the key skilled team members, who worked in close collaboration with the client to build out the entire structure and set up the PPMO processes. For every project there was a dedicated team, including a project manager, business analysts, QA and scheduler. Some projects also required other skills, such as a SME or an Enterprise Architect or an Agile Coach. The team were structured into groups, such as Portfolio support group, a PPMO operations team and the core project teams. All the team members were integrated and also several trainings were conducted to ensure that proper knowledge management was done for the entire team to equip them and augment their skills needed for the projects to be undertaken.

Since lean and agile was a big focus, the Agile Coaching was done to the team members to get them acclimatized to agile way of doing work. Several Agile ceremonies, artifacts and processes were followed, and the teams started to welcome changes that were much needed. There were also alongside, several lean and six sigma trainings ad workshops conducted. The business owners of several departments were empowered to choose the teams and projects as a candidate for six sigma and quality improvement type projects.

The Result

The result was a much smoother demand and resource capacity management for the client to forecast what projects to undertake and when. Hence a robust prioritization structure helped the client with ensuring that right projects are done at the right time. There was also a higher efficiency as processes got more streamlined. The leadership and other team members had a visibility into their projects, getting key stats in the weekly status reports, which were formatted to have indicators for scope, schedule, risk and overall health of the project. One of the big wins for the client was also ensuring that project comply with federal mandated regulations to get funding for them. The teams felt more confident and less stressed out, as they were able to work together in an Agile manner.