2025-2027 Business Plan
Contents
Our purpose Building a robust business Building long-term trusted partnerships PMO and Change Management Building our brand Proud to be part of Project One Our climate collective Embracing technology Supporting charities close to our hearts Our stories
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“My experience is that Project One has deeper experience than other consultancies, a team that has a wide skillset to support us to grow. They’re giving us the tools and the toolbelt to grow.”
‘Making a real difference to our customers, and to the lives of their customers’
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Business over the past 24-months has been eventful for a whole host of local and global reasons. Economic conditions have been particularly challenging, driven primarily by conflict both in Europe and the Middle East, which has directly impacted the cost of oil and downstream into energy, thereby influencing inflation and interest rates. Meanwhile around half the world’s population, in more than 70 countries, undertook a national election in 2024, this being described as the largest election year in history, with results that were in the main unfavourable for incumbent parties, with new leaders elected. It is widely speculated that recent global economic crises and international conflicts were the largest international drivers for changes in government, on top of various domestic issues. Often, as is the case currently, these macro events form part of a cycle, meaning that we know following a period of instability that the cycle will turn positively in due course. The key enabler for our business is the continued reduction in interest rates, which directly impacts the cost of commercial borrowing for our customers to invest in their change and transformation agendas. Businesses have a known pent-up demand following two challenging years of relatively low levels of activity particularly regarding the mobilisation of new transformation programmes. Throughout Q4-24 we have seen an uptick in enquiries which is a positive sign of things to come, particularly as a number of conversations could lead to a team sale. Maintaining our levels of customer engagement and conversations are key to protecting our position and keeping us front of mind. Over the years, we have built a fantastic reputation for quality, senior leadership capability across all three elements of our refreshed Value Proposition - Programme Management, Change Management and PMO. We continue to be recognised in the UK Top 20 by the Financial Times Leading Management Consultancy rankings, and even more so by Consultancy.uk for our specialism in PPM where we continue to be ranked second in the country and for being the leading boutique in our sphere. One of our core values is the Power of the Team, which sits at the heart of our DNA in everything that we do both internally as a business and externally in support of our customers. Each of us should play our part when engaging with our customers, stakeholders and network to promote our brand and our capabilities with market growth in mind. We start the year with a positive mindset and optimistic outlook for a brighter year ahead as the business world stabilises and returns to growth.
Our purpose
Our mission is as true today as when Project One began in 1998. Our role is to transform and make a real difference to our customers and to the lives of their customers. We are Transformers! We remain the UK’s leading boutique management consultancy in our core service of Programme and Project Management, and I look forward to taking our refreshed Value Proposition including Change Management and PMO to market in 2025, ensuring our customers get the best value out of our teams.
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Running a robust business Our goal will always be to maintain a robust financial foundation that supports our long-term vision and strategic objectives. The business is profitable and cash generative and is built on a solid financial model. We have established processes, systems and data that enable us to monitor our performance closely. We have a great foundation for steady organic growth, delivering our key services of Programme Management, Change Management and PMO and this continues to be our ambition and focus. The business landscape for us and our customers has been more challenging in the past two years. We continue to endure higher than expected interest rates, and the recent budget will see an increase in employers NI from April 2025. Pricing is critical for our customers who are increasingly cost sensitive in this market. Our supply and demand management will continue to be led by the sales pipeline generated by the Sales and Consulting Teams. We will continue to strengthen the Sales Team, recognising that customer relationships are at the heart of our success. We can take pride in our financial contribution to the UK economy. We will continue to conduct ourselves with integrity and support other businesses, providing interesting work for our team.
Against this backdrop, we continue to manage our costs, seeking value for money from suppliers. We continue to nurture our relationships with those who advise and support us, staying close to our bankers, NatWest, our commercial finance and tax advisors, RSM, and building a good relationship with our new auditors, Azets.
The key financial metrics are outlined below:
2024 Plan
2024 Actual
2025 Plan
2026 Plan
2027 Plan
Average Consultant Day Rates Consultant Revenue (incl. FTCs)
£1,490 £1,539
£1,500 £1,510
£1,520
A UK Top Consulting Firm
£25.5m £22.6m £24.1m £25m £26.37m
PMO Revenue
£1m
£0.3m £0.9m £1.0m £1.0m
Consulting Director Revenue
£0.5m £0.3m £0.33m £0.5m £0.65m
Total Revenue (excluding expenses)
£27m £23.2m £25.33m £26.5m £28.02m
£6.2m £5.2m £5.4m £5.83m £6.16m
EBITDA
Operating Margin
23%
22%
21%
22%
22%
Average Total Team Deployed (incl. PMO)
75
62
71
75
79
£28m £22m £26m £28m £30m
Total Sales
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UK #1 Boutique Consultancy for PPM
Building long-term trusted partnerships with our customers
It’s amazing to see the impact our incredible team continue to make, orchestrating activity from the top of the transformation agenda across our Value Proposition of Programme Management, Change Management and PMO. Through this, we will continue to build strong relationships at a senior level and identify further ways to add value to our customers. Over the next year, our objective is to grow our levels of support across key accounts such as BAE Systems, National Grid, Unilever, AstraZeneca, Atomic Weapons Establishment, International Airlines Group and Rolls-Royce, building upon our strong reputation as a trusted delivery partner. The key to this growth will be selling team assignments within our customers’ most complex transformation programmes, where they can benefit from the full range of our Value Proposition. Our account teams, led by our Consulting Directors, will use our refreshed Value Proposition and sales collateral to help create new opportunities.
Programme Management will continue to be the core of our customer offering, whilst growth will come from a significant uplift of Change Management and PMO, each of which now have dedicated sales leaders and campaigns (see pages 10-11 for more details). As the market re-engages in 2025, we will grow our customer base by identifying, targeting and securing new, exciting organisations to support where we believe significant transformation activity is underway and budget is available. We can create opportunities by leveraging our recent experience in areas such as ERP where we know that significant transformation activity will take place as customers transform from end-of-life, legacy SAP and Oracle platforms onto the new SAP S/4HANA and Oracle Fusion Cloud solutions.
Our business thrives through keeping pace with our customers’ needs and the changing market priorities. This requires transformational activity to be shaped up and delivered, and that’s what we do best. Leading as Transformers, we make a real difference for our customers and the lives of their customers.
“Project One has really helped us to embed better project and programme management capabilities within the team, enabling us to deliver for our customers, for our colleagues and for the business. They are professional, highly skilled, outcome-focused, and they integrate really well with my team.” Harriet Hunter - Director of Customer Care British Airways
The Bakkavor Team
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PMO: Driving success with governance and control Our PMO offering is a core part of our Value Proposition, and our objective is to grow our footprint through 2025. In all customer conversations about new opportunities, we will include our PMO offering to build a greater number of team engagements. This will enable our delivery teams to lead the programme, provide Change Management and govern each transformation initiative. This will mean that we are providing an end-to-end consulting service, ensuring our customers’ programmes are set up for success. PMO is a key part of the 2025 plan, generating revenue from both PMO leadership, which can be using core consulting capability, and PMO analysts. We currently provide outstanding PMO solutions for our customers at BAES, Bakkavor, National Grid, Unilever, Slimming World and IAG, with our expert teams who define, implement, run and improve our customers’ transformation initiatives. Our objective is to establish Project One as expert leaders of PMO in 2025.
Change Management: A growth engine
At Project One, we are known for our core offering in Programme Management. Change Management is not new to us. We already deliver it successfully in major programmes for organisations like BAE Systems, AstraZeneca and Texere - a Conexiant company (previously known as BroadcastMed) where it is an enabler for digital transformation. For organisations to digitise successfully, it is essential not only to drive adoption of tools and processes but also to embed the culture required for the business. Interest from recent inbound enquiries has shown a growing demand for Change Management. Our objective is to grow our Change Management footprint to meet the increased levels of demand we are seeing in the market. We see this part of our Value Proposition as a key growth area for the future. Our objective is to build on this success, and we are targeting opportunities within our key accounts, both existing and new. By telling our story more effectively, we can turn this proven capability into a cornerstone of our business. Our strategy builds on our strengths and drives incremental growth. It’s about cementing our role as transformation leaders who enable greater levels of adoption, benefits realisation, and sustained levels of success for our customers.
Delivering the strategy To deliver on our ambition, we will adopt a targeted, focused and deliberate approach, leveraging the many large-scale initiatives to position Change Management as critical for user adoption and benefits realisation. We will include Change Management in all new conversations, offering customers an end-to-end consulting service alongside Programme Management and PMO. We will equip our Change Management Team with the appropriate tools and techniques to deliver impactful Change Management that drives digital and operational success, alongside continuing to grow our Change Management capability to lead the change agenda across diverse customer needs. By leveraging our Programme Management, Change Management and PMO capabilities, we can deliver transformations that are not only executed but embraced, adopted and sustained.
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Building our brand
To connect with our target audience, our Sales and Marketing messages must resonate with the organisational and personal challenges our customers face, ensuring Project One is a go-to partner for leading their complex change and transformation agenda. The Sales and Marketing Teams will continue to be integrated and build brand awareness in the market using existing and new channels in 2025. In recent years, we have established an effective method for lead generation leading to over £2million of new name business, even in a challenging 2024, including Bakkavor, Slimming World, Texere - a Conexiant company, Sovereign Network Group and Alternative Futures Group. We will continue to optimise our multi-channel approach to reach existing, new and dormant customers. Our digital strategy will capture prospective customers in their time of need and drive enquiries and opportunities to our Consulting Directors. We will engage our existing Marketing database of buyers and influencers from leading organisations through targeted email marketing. This will be linked to content they have previously engaged with. LinkedIn continues to be our key go-to-market social platform. Our purpose as a business is to make a real difference to our customers and the lives of their customers. We do this by supporting on challenging, long-term delivery programmes with the UK’s most exciting organisations.
In 2024, we refreshed the articulation of our Value Proposition, crafting a simple narrative to how we lead our customers’ complex change and transformation programmes through Programme Management, Change Management and PMO. This will be the foundation of our Marketing campaigns ensuring the experience of our Consulting Team is front and centre. It’s the people that make Project One special. We want everyone to be proud of our individual and collective successes and, as brand ambassadors, share our stories far and wide. We will introduce new channels to support this, starting with the launch of the Project One Podcast ‘Transformation Talks’ in January 2025. We are proud to maintain our position within the Financial Times Leading Management Consultants report for the sixth consecutive year, highlighting the value the team brings to our customers every day, and this will remain a USP for us going forward.
Internal Communications As a people business, it’s vital to keep everyone informed about developments across the organisation and to create opportunities for everyone to contribute to our ongoing success. The nature of our business has us working remotely and embedded within customer environments, therefore maintaining strong communication with our team is a cornerstone of our business, ensuring a shared sense of belonging and a supportive culture. We are committed to a multi-channel approach that ensures timely, engaging, and inclusive communication at various intervals. This includes real-time updates via WhatsApp, the weekly e-newsletter, One Voice, the monthly ‘One Town Hall’ via Teams, virtual Lunch and Learn sessions that focus on development, and Face-to-Face events that bring the team together to collaborate and celebrate success. This structured approach ensures that our team feels connected, informed, and valued, regardless of location, and enables us to sustain the collaborative culture that drives our success.
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We recognise that a reminder of our People Proposition is always useful.
Proud to be part of our team
Here are the key components and highlights:
Reward and Benefits Alongside our competitive salary and bonus model we offer: Our company pension scheme with Royal London continues to outperform the benchmark for investment growth and is monitored by our appointed pension scheme advisor Mattioli Woods. Our employer contribution of 5% of salary is in excess of the mandatory 3% statutory obligation. Additionally, for those who choose to make monthly contributions through salary sacrifice we increase the amount of the contribution by the amount of the employer national insurance saving. A comprehensive range of market-leading health and life insurance products. Our ‘Which Recommended’ private medical insurance and widely utilised health cash-back plan support both physical and mental wellbeing. This is further enhanced by our Employee Assistance Programme through Health Assured who offer confidential counselling, financial and legal advice and access to wellness resources, all designed to improve wellbeing. Additionally, our car lease salary sacrifice scheme from Tusker offer petrol, hybrid and electric vehicles, and has been Green Apple Award winners for Environmental Best Practice for 7 years.
Enhancing our People Proposition Our People Proposition is key to being an employer of choice. We remain committed to creating an environment that attracts, nurtures and retains great people that bring outstanding value to our customers. This is built around four key components: Reward and Benefits Expectations and Engagement Recognition Learning and Development. We have made significant progress in each area, and our ambition remains to: Incentivise, reward and recognise high performance Promote our values and foster positive behaviour Enable the growth of our people aligning to our business objectives Facilitate two-way, timely feedback to support continuous improvement for the team and Project One. We will be joined by a new people leader early next year, and they will have the opportunity to shape and refine our priorities and plans, which we aim to publish in H1.
A UK Top Consulting Firm
UK #1 Boutique Consultancy for PPM
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Expectations and Engagement Every three years, we conduct an externally benchmarked survey to gather team feedback. Since 2019, we’ve partnered with Great Place to Work (GPTW). Insights from these surveys shape our People Proposition and business strategy. The next GPTW survey is set for 2025, with results published in 2026. As a result of feedback in 2019, the team asked for a clearer set of expectations of how we all can contribute to the growth and development of the business. Developed within the teams we then published what are now critical statements that set out not only what the business expects of our Leadership, Consulting and Shared Services Teams, but what us as a team expect of Project One. Delivering on these expectations is one of the most important ingredients in continuing to thrive as a business and a team and will remain a key focus for all of us. You can view the Expectations here.
Recognition In line with our Expectations, we celebrate the exemplary behaviours and achievements of our team through three award categories: Values Awards: celebrating those who live and breathe our values every day Prize: £1,000, iPad or equivalent, Bollinger, Trophy Project One Award for Excellence: recognising an individual who embodies every Value and demonstrates excellence in whatever they do, whenever they do it. Prize: £5,000, iPad or equivalent, Bollinger, Trophy Growth Awards: recognising those who go above and beyond to secure new business Prize: £2,500, Bollinger Long Service Awards: acknowledging members of the team who reach 5, 10, 15 and 20 years of service Prize: £400 to enjoy a celebratory meal. We’re delighted to have awarded 82 Values Awards and 149 Growth Awards since we introduced the awards in 2016. Congratulations!
Learning and Development Our team’s growth is driven by continuous learning and collaboration through our work and shared resources. We develop skills through challenging Communities also play an important role in helping to develop skills within our team The Knowledge Library stores delivery assets, tools, and stories, helping us to excel in new projects customer assignments and share experiences via the One Town Hall. Lunch and Learn sessions, guided by team suggestions, explore topics like AI, Cybersecurity, LinkedIn, and Financial Wellbeing We support relevant professional qualifications for members of the team when they’re required to perform their role. We have to grow our sales, customer leadership and delivery capability in a sustainable way, and we closely align our recruitment activity with demand and market conditions. We are formalising how we grow and promote internally through our Future Leaders scheme which launched this year. The scheme allows consultants to experience life as a CD working on Sales opportunities, and attending OpCo and Leadership Team development sessions. We plan to expand this programme in 2025 and 2026, and we will continue to communicate more around our recruitment planning as the plans are agreed with the new HR leadership.
for Wellbeing Best Workplaces ™
UK 2023
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Our Climate Collective
Supporting the energy transition one programme at a time Delivering the transition to clean, affordable and secure energy for the UK is a massive transformative undertaking for the nation. It will require successful delivery of many complex investment, upgrade, development and change and transformation programmes across the energy sector. At Project One, our mission is to support our customers to deliver those complex programmes. We are already playing a key role, supporting organisations to: Meet regulatory and compliance demands Deliver business critical technology upgrades Improve infrastructure project delivery and through-life management
Improve organisational performance, driving efficiency and capability Establish and mobilise new public and private organisations in the energy market. The Energy sector remains a focus for us, and we look forward to building on our track record of complex programme delivery in: Electricity transmission and distribution Gas transmission networks and metering Gas market central data services provision Alternative energy project origination,
We will focus on sustaining the momentum of our current initiatives. Key to this is our partnership with OnHand, which has helped reduce personal CO2 emissions across our team while contributing to social value. We will continue to strengthen our sustainability efforts, integrating eco-friendly practices into all business operations. In 2024, we retained our Bronze EcoVadis rating, which is a positive reflection of the effort that we invest in this important topic. We remain committed to continual improvement by focusing on three key actions, including: Enhanced reporting to improve transparency Training to empower our team with sustainability knowledge Building strategic partnerships that align with our environmental goals. By maintaining these efforts and staying true to our guiding principles , we will ensure long-term progress and drive meaningful change within our organisation and the broader community. Over the past five years, we have made significant progress towards our own sustainability goals, including achieving our target of 50% carbon reduction by 2030. This milestone is a testament to our commitment to reducing our environmental impact, with notable successes in CO2 emission reductions, transitioning to eco-friendly office spaces, and improving energy efficiency. We are dedicated to achieving net-zero emissions by 2050 and will continue to build on these achievements.
development and operation Nuclear power generation and decommissioning.
The ‘Power’ of the Team Our Consulting Team has strong networks across this industry, and we will work together to leverage these relationships and add value to organisations to accelerate the climate change and sustainability agenda for the UK.
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Embracing technology
We began piloting Microsoft Co-Pilot (an AI assistant) which has generated excellent insight into the opportunities and challenges of using Gen-AI technologies across the business. The pilot will continue into H1 2025 and will shape how we plan to exploit these technologies in the future. In 2025, we plan to transition our IT managed service to a new supplier, Sharp IT. We intend to start a series of initiatives that will enhance the robustness and agility of the IT that underpins our operations. Alongside these initiatives, the laptop and mobile phone refresh programme, migration to Windows 11, Cyber Security awareness initiatives, and other ‘business as usual’ projects that are so important to the smooth running of Project One, have progressed well and will continue next year. In 2024, renewing our Cyber Essentials accreditation was critical to meet customer demand. The bar for this gets higher every year and this is a key focus for our 2025 planning, particularly to support our continued work in the Defence sector. Similarly, we will continue with annual penetration testing to ensure our security is robust.
Supporting charities close to our hearts
In 2024, we were allocated £15,000 to support local, national and international charities and community projects. In addition to donating the £15,000 we have raised £5,000 as a team. Thank you to all who got involved, we could not have achieved the outcomes without you. During the year we supported 20 organisations, ranging from Motor Neurone Disease to Hedgehog Rescue, to Shelter and our local Middlewich and District Foodbank. We enjoyed a range of Charity Committee run events such as the team hike to the summit Yr Wyddf (Snowdon) to raise funds for the England and Wales Mountain Rescue, and ‘100 miles in a month’ for Parkinson’s research, which affects members of our colleagues’ families. The Charity Committee is made up of colleagues who go the extra mile to organise, support and run our charity events throughout the year.
Congratulations to those in the team who took part in individual sponsored events like Emma Anderson’s series of half marathons, Sarah- Jane Campbell’s Hyrox Competition and Ed Davies running 1000k in a year. Next year the Charity Committee will focus on running at least one Project One event each quarter in order to: Donate to charities to support families, individuals and children affected by natural disasters and conflicts Continue to support charities and community projects, which our colleagues care about and are involved in Support charities local to Project One that we identify or receive requests from Respond to requests from colleagues to contribute to our customers’ charitable activities.
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Customer stories There is a lot to be proud of across Project One, and we should pause and take a moment to celebrate some of our highlights and the real difference we make to our customers and to the lives of their customers. There are tons of great stories to choose from and you should work with your CD to build your own way of talking to your customers about those that are relevant to them. Here are some short stories to get you started.
GCAP
We helped British Airways (BA) to recover and deliver a significant global strategic programme of change to deliver effective and enhanced customer service, and reduced costs through improving employee experience. Working with the Director of Customer Care, we delivered four Global Engagement Centres, from building sites to fully fitted, connected offices, fit for modern ways of working which enable BA staff to provide a world-class customer service. Additionally, we left behind the internal team with higher levels of performance in the delivery of transformation initiatives, along with collateral and approaches in planning, risk management, financial control, stakeholder engagement, governance, and team leadership. British Airways Delivering enhanced customer service for the World’s Favourite Airline
Deploying the next generation fighter
We are supporting The Global Combat Air Programme (GCAP), the multinational initiative led by the UK, Japan and Italy to develop the sixth-generation stealth fighter. We were asked to facilitate the Programme Management Working Group. Alongside Leonardo and Mitsubishi F-X we defined the end-to-end programme delivery lifecycle, delivery assurance gates and criteria, mandated programme artefacts and project and programme roles and responsibilities. We further identified the key programme delivery policies required and expected Programme Management tooling. Bakkavor face the challenge of managing disparate IT systems and are focused on a successful ERP transformation, including the rollout of S/4HANA across multiple sites and the consolidation of their ERP systems. We are leading the delivery on the customer side and to help them successfully get back on track to deliver their transformation. Bakkavor Delivering S/4HANA across multiple sites and rationalising their ERP systems.
AWE Continuing to keep the UK safe and secure
We are leading the Business Digital Capability Transformation Programme - enabling AWE to effectively realise its wider commitments by adopting industry standard design and manufacturing planning and execution processes. Success means information and work in the design and manufacturing domains is able to flow more effectively, errors and manual interventions will be reduced, and staff are upskilled to work effectively in a modern operational environment.
Alternative Futures Group
Culture change through digital transformation
Slimming World Resetting the programme for true business transformation
Our team are actively involved in designing their Culture Change Programme and roadmap, which is one of the five pillars of their growth strategy over the next three years. Additionally, their digital strategy is another essential pillar, both of which necessitate robust Change Management support. We are focused on how we can best assist in delivering these transformative initiatives to underpin their nationwide growth.
We’re recovering a programme that launched in late 2022, evolving into a more strategic and impactful business transformation journey. Our PMO experts deployed a new set of tools and processes to help Slimming World mature its emerging enterprise PMO function.
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