Leeds Trinity University
Optimising Estates Portfolio Governance
In a nutshell…
As part of our long-term collaborative relationship with Leeds Trinity University, we helped the university with improve their ways of working
This is one of multiple projects with Leeds Trinity University (read the other case study here).
They are a public university in Horsforth that educates over 5,000 students taking foundation, undergraduate and postgraduate programmes.
The university was undergoing the implementation of its estates strategy which involved a pipeline of exciting capital projects, including the opening of a City Centre campus.
In order to assure the successful delivery of the estates portfolio and to optimise the return on investment, the university wanted to ensure they had a robust governance and delivery framework in place. They needed the right processes to be in place to ensure projects ran effectively and would meet their objectives.
“We acknowledged that their Project Management Office (PMO) practices needed to be more formalised within the estate and facilities department.” – Mollie Veale, Optimo’s Improvement Manager.
To be able to pull the framework together, the below focus areas were identified:
- governance and controls around risk management,
- decision-making,
- reporting,
- financial management,
- stakeholder engagement.
A lot of these had already been happening, but we needed to ensure that they were being done formally and consistently.
At first, we conducted an assessment of the core areas to gauge how formal, consistent and mature they were in practice, and proposed recommendations where there were improvement areas. From this, we pulled together a proposed target state for the estate’s PMO function.
We then walked the team through the proposals to:
- get their initial views and collaborate on the proposed solutions,
- agree on what priorities,
- assign actions and owners for taking forward,
This process ensured that these proposals were fit for purpose for the way that the department works and allowed the university to be in control and take accountability.
We continued to support the team throughout the implementation of recommendations through weekly action tracking and the development of certain solutions.
One key area included the review of the governance of the estates portfolio to ensure it was working effectively in terms of structure, information flow and membership, dependent on the project’s complexity and interlinking with other strategic programmes in the university. This involved putting together a proposal, taking it through an approval process with key stakeholders and implementing it across key capital projects. Project templates were reviewed, updated, and implemented to enable consistent and accurate progress reporting throughout all levels of the governance structure.
At regular intervals, we conducted a gap analysis of the different areas within the framework. This involved the team self-assessing their progress against the target state, identifying where there were gaps and the plans to address them.
The improvements that were implemented as part of this piece of work were included in the scope of an audit by UNIAC. UNIAC are auditors for a wide range of universities and higher education providers across the UK. They host value-adding, in-depth audits that provide assurance.
The audit was successfully passed which proved the quality of the governance and delivery framework we implemented and embedded with the university.
Overall, the project and audit cemented to the university the quality of their ways of working. There was good self-awareness of where there were gaps or areas for improvement and the university was clear on the actions they needed to take to address them. There was a real sense of ownership, collaboration and teamwork and we thoroughly enjoyed being a part of their journey.