2024-2026 Business Plan
Contents
Our purpose Running a robust business Developing long-term, trusted partnerships Building our brand Proud to be part of Project One Our Climate Collective saving the world Embracing technology Supporting charities close to our hearts Customer stories
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‘Making a real difference to our customers, and to the lives of their customers’
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Our purpose 2023 was a challenging year for all businesses, with macro-economic conditions and geo-political agendas impacting and impeding change and growth. I’m incredibly proud of how we, as a team and business, navigated the year and have been recognised by the industry in 2023 more than ever before. This recognition starts and ends with you, our awesome team. This level of recognition raises the question of where do we go from here? How do we go from good to great, and truly unlock the potential of Project One? How do we harness the power of our team and our customers? We have always focused on our core offering and we do it well. Being clear on our role in the market involves being known for what we do and how well we do it. Leveraging our expertise, our experience, our accolades, and sharing them with our combined networks increases our levels of brand awareness. If we do this consistently and as a collective, it will make a real difference to create our next step change. It’s time to be bold and be proud of who we are. It’s not just about what we know, it’s how we apply it to the world of our customers’ organisations. It is this contextual application of our expertise that enables us to bring our value to market. We have a proven track record with our existing customers, who we have forged long-term partnerships with. However, we need to showcase ourselves to a wider audience who don’t know us or haven’t worked with us, yet. The sum of the parts is greater than the whole and harnessing the ‘One Team’ ethos is our goal. Our aspiration, our desired outcome, is to support a greater level of customers, providing even more challenging and interesting long-term opportunities for our Consulting Team. This is always with the one end in mind: Making a real difference to our customers and to the lives of their customers. To achieve this, we will continue to do what we do best for our customers in leading their business-critical change and transformation, be it technology, business, or governance, but always taking the complex and making it simple for them. Our past informs our present and future. Our existing business continues to build our reputation, enabling us to take on further challenges on behalf of our customers, ultimately creating referrals and introductions from satisfied customers to other industry professionals.
Our mission, our strategy, reads as true today as when Project One began in 1998. Our role is to be the difference makers, the organisation that makes change happen, delivering real change that makes a real difference. As the UK’s leading independent change management consultancy in Project and Programme Management, we work alongside industry leaders helping them to answer difficult business questions and deliver significant change and transformation. We continue to work across all sectors and industries, often for global organisations and/or national infrastructure. Three awards from Great Place to Work speaks to our people centric approach. Our fourth year as a Financial Times Leading Management Consultancy, speaks to our unwavering customer focus. The independent ranking by Consultancy.uk as the UK’s #2 firm for Project and Programme Management (PPM) brings these two elements together showcasing how we, as a team, successfully deliver our service and proposition, securing our customers’ desired outcomes.
Office opening
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Running a robust business Strong financial management is key to maintaining a robust and resilient business. 2023 saw a softening of the consulting market and we were not able to repeat the stellar performance of 2022 as we had planned. While the revenue outturn was below our ambition, we protected our margins and were comfortably able to meet our financial commitments. The working capital cycle has been optimised for maximum cash efficiency and we continued to enjoy low debtor days and we suffered no bad debts. Fee rates continue to increase through 2023, alongside great levels of utilisation. During our 25th anniversary year, we enjoyed celebrating our success by moving into our new head office, launching our new website and the outstanding summer event attended by over 200 guests at the stunning One Marylebone. The new office and the website are enduring investments, and we will continue to maintain these and make improvements as the need arises.
Our medium-term plans for the next three years reflect our aspiration for steady organic growth. The key financial metrics are outlined below: deployed would be the ideal size for an independent boutique consultancy like ours. We will continue to focus on our core offering of leading Change and Transformation via PPM, Change Management and PMO. For 2024 and beyond, we continue to aim for steady organic growth, recognising that around 100 consultants
2023 Plan
2023 Actual
2024 Plan
2025 Plan
2026 Plan
Average Consultant Day Rates Consultant Revenue (incl. FTCs)
£1,470 £1,539
£1,490 £1,495
£1,500
£26.1m £24.3m £25.5m £26.6m £27.7m
PMO Revenue
£1.8m £0.7m £1.0m £1.0m £1.0m
Consulting Director Revenue
£0.6m £0.2m £0.5m £0.6m £0.7m
Total Revenue (excluding expenses)
£28.5m £25.2m £27.0m £28.2m £29.4m
EBITDA
£6.4m £5.4m £6.1m £6.4m £6.6m
Average Consultants Deployed Average Total Team Deployed (incl. PMO)
79
69
75
81
84
87
73
80
86
89
£33m £28m £28m £29m £30m
Total Sales
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Developing long-term trusted partnerships Our customers are at the heart of our purpose as an organisation and at the centre of everything we do as a business. Growing existing, and building new, long-term relationships that are based on consistent, high-quality delivery and trust, is key to achieving our ambitions. We have built a strong customer base which we will continue to nurture through dedicated account management from the Consulting Director Team. Alongside this, we will actively look for areas where we can extend our support for them and build more team assignments as we have successfully done at BAE Systems, National Grid, Unilever, International Airlines Group and AstraZeneca , amongst others. Leading their most complex, critical change and transformation programmes has developed a strong reputation and positioned Project One as a trusted consultancy partner. Using our core service proposition of Project and Programme Management, Change Management and PMO, with specific, thematic areas around ERP and Climate Change & Sustainability, we will proactively engage with current and new customers to continue to build awareness of our capabilities. Our broader business development focus will be on identifying, targeting, and securing new, exciting customers for us to support. We will target large-scale organisations with a significant transformation agenda; the available investment to deliver change and an openness to independent external support. These types of organisations afford us the opportunity to support through team assignments on high-profile, exciting change programmes, as well as position, and build, Project One as a consultancy partner for their businesses.
We will organise our business development activities around market sectors with the Consulting Director Team leading a specific focus on: Defence Financial Services Public Sector CPG Pharma & Healthcare. Alongside this, a continued focus on nurturing personal networks, across our whole team, will open-up conversations and secure new work, as we have seen this year with Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE), Pogust Goodhead and the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA).
Three new Consulting Directors joined the team in 2023 and we are actively looking for at least three more in 2024 to further strengthen the Sales Team. This will ensure we have sufficient capacity to build our customer relationships and continue to secure work in new and existing accounts. Our aim is to build to a team of 10 Consulting Directors over the next couple of years to focus on our opportunity pipeline. These leaders will be sourced both internally and externally so that we can identify the right capabilities to take our business forward and build on our success. We will leverage the power of our Consulting Team via the service communities, which will continue to run under consultant leadership. These communities will support our market awareness and sales efforts by providing high quality consulting content and will harvest delivery assets to make sure our customers are benefiting from accelerated delivery.
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Building our brand
Our marketing campaigns will create multiple touchpoints across a variety of channels, helping to increase our visibility and credibility amongst our target audience. This will in turn support the whole team in strengthening existing relationships and widening our networks, providing a solid foundation for new conversations. Our best channel to reach our target audience is you. All of you are brand ambassadors. Be proud of the fantastic work you do, share each other’s customer stories, and find out where else we can sprinkle the Project One magic dust, bringing more value to more organisations - all focused on the same goal of securing exciting, long-term assignments, as part of a Project One Team. In recent years, we have established an effective method to build our marketing database via online advertising and nurturing this target audience through to qualified sales leads. In 2023, we launched our new website that has increased our digital presence through our content and SEO strategy. Alongside this, our record-breaking year of recognition and published thought leadership has helped to strengthen our brand awareness. Our purpose as a business is to make a real difference to our customers and the lives of their customers. Our sales and marketing must connect with the organisational and personal challenges our customers face to ensure Project One is the obvious go-to partner for delivering their complex change and transformation.
In 2024, we will relaunch Project One to the market with our Brand Campaign. This will allow us to reinforce our proposition and differentiators to four audiences: 1. Existing customers: expand the knowledge our current customers have and ensure they understand our whole service proposition. 2. New name customers: build our customer base through marketing and our networks. 3. Dormant customers: reconnect with previous customers and remind them of the value we can bring to their organisation. 4. Recruitment candidates: attract the best people to continue to strengthen our team and grow our business.
Two underpinning campaigns throughout the year will include PPM (including PMO) and Change Management. ERP and Climate Change & Sustainability remain hot topics and collateral will continue to be developed and shared to support customer conversations. This will feed into the marketing campaigns and sales activity. LinkedIn will continue to be our key platform, supported by a PR and digital strategy. We’re also excited to launch our brand-new company podcast, a new route to market that will help to bring our core services to life for those who don’t know us yet. We will keep in touch in our usual way, arming you with the tools you need to spread the word. And we will celebrate success at our social events throughout the year.
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Proud to be part of our team
You are the driving force and the reason we thrive as an organisation. Our community of experienced professionals are here for each other. We help and support each other where needed to make a real difference to our customers and the lives of their customers. Investing in our people proposition will continue to be a priority in 2024, focusing on Expectations, Learning, Recognition, and Reward. We will continue to be a great place to work; your feedback on how Project One runs is vital to delivering this. With our next participation in ‘Great Place to Work’ in 2025, next year we will continue to talk with you about our business, identifying what is important to you and your work, listening to your feedback, requirements; from accessing on-line solutions, to attending specific courses; continuing to share knowledge through increasing material on the Knowledge Library and running Lunch and Learn sessions. We will identify learning solutions that deliver the best value for our team, and our business, increasing our capability and keeping us relevant to the needs of our customers. Working with a small group from across our consultant community, we will identify further learning solutions in H1, and introduce them in the second half of 2024. ensuring we continue to improve as a business. Your feedback on learning covers a broad range of
Future Leaders One of our most exciting initiatives, our ‘Future Leaders’ scheme, launches in January 2024. Future Leaders is establishing a clear framework for career development and the opportunity to become a leader of our business, shaping our future, securing our independence, and helping us continue our growth journey. With our first group of four starting in January, our focus will be on working with them to be successful. We will listen to their feedback to enable us to shape the scheme for future generations. Congratulations to Emma Anderson, Giles Randle, Redwan Begh and Simon Murfin, we wish you every success in the year ahead. Rewards and benefits We recognise the importance our financial, health & wellbeing benefits are to you and your families. There is a range of information and choices on how to get the most out of these benefits. These include financial education, wellbeing, fund management flexibility through Royal London, health and lifestyle advice and our PMI and cash plan schemes.
Growing our team Creating and developing new assignment opportunities for colleagues will always be a key element of our business. An outstanding 60 Growth Awards have been awarded, over the last three years, showing that your contribution plays an incredibly important role in growing Project One. To recognise this, next year we will simplify into a single Growth Award with an increased reward of £2,500. Continuing to strengthen our incredibly talented team remains a key goal to support our growth ambitions. Our ambition is to achieve a 10% increase in our team size, building our capability across Change Management, ERP, and Digital Transformation, making sure our team reflects the broad and diverse nature of our customers and their needs. If you know someone you would be proud to introduce to Project One, please get in touch; a successful referral candidate receives our recruitment award. Project One is made up of an incredibly special group of people, uniting to make a very special place to work. We are a team and a business I am proud to be part of. I hope you are too.
for Wellbeing Best Workplaces ™
UK 2023
99% 99% Of people were made to feel welcome when they joined the team.
Of people here are willing to give extra to get the job done.
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We have established five key guiding principles to anchor our internal sustainability efforts going forwards: 1. Offsetting is a last resort; we will do everything we can to reduce our footprint first. For example, we have reduced our CO2e by moving from a general municipal waste collection system where most of our waste went to landfill to full waste recycling through a carbon neutral service provider. In 2024 we will undertake a data audit to reduce our data storage driven CO2e. 2. We will be sustainable by design; considering sustainability in all new buying decisions and changes. In head office, motion sensor lighting ensures that lights only come on in portions of the office in use; they also have sensors that capture the amount of light entering the building from the floor to ceiling windows and adjust lighting accordingly. 3. We challenge the status quo; challenging our people and our customers to work differently. We are sharing tips with colleagues on how to work more sustainably from home – switching off monitors and shutting laptops down at night. Working with our customers, we are keen to explore new ways to reduce C02e whilst delivering the same level of service, for example applying travel quotas or a carbon tax to a programme. 4. Our people are paramount; we will invest in our people, educating and enabling them to think and behave differently. In 2023, we launched our new sustainability app, OnHand, to provide colleagues with instant access to information on sustainability and ways to reduce personal C02e and increase social value. 5. We believe in holistic sustainability; where sustainability is part of a balanced scorecard of operational performance metrics for our business. To provide visibility and enable informed decision-making, we built a sustainability dashboard; we will use this to identify and provide focus on areas for improvement. As part of our unwavering commitment to making a real difference, we are dedicated to tackling the pressing issue of climate change and embracing sustainability in all aspects of our operations. In 2019, we signed up to the UN Race to Zero, pledging to halve our emissions by 2030 and achieve net-zero emissions by 2050. While we have made significant strides in this journey, such as transitioning to an eco- friendly office space, we recognise that there is still much more we can accomplish. Our Climate Collective saving the world
We continue to reduce our environmental footprint and are actively reducing our consumption of energy, water, and minimising waste generation. We are committed to transparent and accountable reporting on our progress towards our sustainability goals and will track our progress and identify areas for improvement through our quarterly sustainability dashboard. Our people play a pivotal role in achieving our sustainability goals, and we are committed to empowering you to contribute meaningfully to this initiative. We are investing in our team through regular Lunch and Learn sessions and constantly exploring new and innovative solutions to enhance our sustainability performance and enable us to collaborate for impact. It’s also great to see our team making the most of our recently launched EV scheme.
By working together internally, we can design better, more robust solutions that result in a greater impact and by potentially collaborating with external partners, we can collectively have a greater impact for customers by providing a holistic solution. Partnering with OnHand is helping to foster a culture of sustainability within our organisation and amplify our sustainability efforts through collective action. Our ultimate ambition is to deliver on our purpose of making a real difference, and our sustainability agenda is a cornerstone of this endeavour. We are committed to continuous improvement and will continue to strive towards a more sustainable future for our planet and our people.
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Embracing technology
Sports day
Supporting charities close to our hearts
In addition, we have undertaken a programme of technology improvements, providing our team with enhanced tools and capabilities while enhancing the security of our IT estate. We successfully migrated from legacy to modern authentication services on our Salesforce Kimble platform, improving user experience and reducing security risk. We assured our resilience by updating and testing the Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery plans for our new offices. We also completed Penetration testing at the end of 2023 to complete the review. In 2024, we will continue to review the performance of our managed service provider to ensure we are getting the best possible service as well as extend the Single Sign On to other software as part of our objective to optimise the user experience. The laptop refresh programme will continue but will start to take sustainability credentials into account when choosing new devices. In 2023, 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 2024 planning, particularly to support our continued work in the defence sector.
In 2023, the team had £25,000 to support 25 charities in our 25th Anniversary year. In addition, you and your families and friends have donated a fantastic £3,500 to support a variety of our activities. Thank you! Overall, we supported 36 organisations in 2023, ranging from the International Red Cross to support people affected by the many natural disasters, to Shelter to support individuals in the UK affected by homelessness and our local Middlewich and District Food Bank for families facing the choice between eating or other financial demands. Throughout the year, there was a good mix of Charity Committee events like the Yorkshire Three Peaks, the Manchester 10k and many individual requests for donations for charities and community projects actively supported by colleagues in their local area. Supporting local, national, and international charities and community projects has always been important and in recent times, has become even more so.
In 2024, the Charity Committee will focus on running at least one company-wide event each quarter, donate to national and international charities and continue to support local charities you are engaged with or charities local to Project One we identify or receive requests from. We look forward to utilising our new OnHand app making charitable activities more accessible to us all. Thank you to the Charity Committee who go the extra mile to organise, support and run our events, and who also look for opportunities to make a difference to help people throughout the year. If you would like to join, we have some available spaces, so please get in touch. Lastly, thank you to everyone who got involved in 2023, no matter how big or small, we couldn’t have achieved what we did without you. Remember, this is your fund and the Charity Committee look forward to supporting causes close to your hearts in 2024.
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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 the real difference we have made to our customers and to the lives of their customers. Here are some short stories that you can share far, and wide. Congratulations team and thank you!
BAE SYSTEMS Aligning excellence across the world’s defence.
DHSC
Co-ordinating a reliable COVID-19 Pandemic response.
Working with BAE Systems, we supported Naval Ships in their first ever exports, to enable the Royal Australian Navy to take on the Hunter Class Frigate design from the UK, and to benefit from one of the world’s most advanced ship designs. We produced a common design, and the mechanism to allow local variant development, that could be shared outside the UK and delivered the required business and engineering systems to allow local construction in Australia to begin.
Working within Central Government, we are extremely proud of the role we played in the fight against the unprecedented pandemic that impacted all our lives. We helped to build capability and capacity across the three divisions of the NHS Test and Trace service; Test, Trace and Contain, in parallel to NHS Supply Chain’s PPE, ICU and vaccinations supply chain. The focus was on ensuring the service had: end-to-end data integrity; a coherent user journey; reduced test cycle times to fasttrack isolation of potential cases; and ability for mass testing to be scaled. In parallel, the vaccination supply chains were established and served both healthcare professionals and Nightingale Hospitals nationwide. Our three-and-a-half-year involvement across 28 workstreams with DHSC during the most testing of circumstances, has run through to the creation of the new UKHSA, replacing Public Health England.
Babcock International Enabling our armed forces to deliver on their vital national and international security role.
We helped to ensure that the British Army has available and fit-for-purpose vehicles and equipment to support its national and international defence duties. Providing transformation leadership, we worked with the Defence Support Group (DSG) at Babcock to deliver a set of key initiatives aimed at improving materiel flow, introducing more effcient ways of working and delivering a great service against key customer priorities.
Telenet
Keeping Belgium connected by enhancing self-service for mobile and broadband products.
British Business Bank Keeping SMEs in business in a global crisis.
We helped to enable customers to self-serve far more extensively for their mobile phone and broadband products and services by helping Telenet (part of Liberty Global) to integrate two separate brands onto a single, new ‘digital first’ platform following an acquisition. This digital transformation allowed them to retire the
We helped save many small UK organisations from going out of business during the COVID pandemic by helping British Business Bank significantly ramp up their operations and capability. We transformed their IT estate and put in place the mechanics to enable a series of change programmes to service the various COVID Business Loan schemes.
acquired legacy systems and empower their teams to drive faster change in a competitive market.
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