Capabilities / Business Efficiency / Project Management
Keep the project moving without pulling your team off the floor.
We carry the management of the project alongside the people already running the business, with scope agreed at the outset, work sequenced against real dependencies, and progress held to the plan across internal teams, suppliers and partners.
What this is
Projects move when managing them is a dedicated job rather than an addition.
Retail projects run across functions that each hold a part of the outcome. Buying holds the range, operations holds the sites, finance holds the model, and the space between them needs managing by a party whose attention is not also on a trading week.
This service supplies that management capacity. Scope is defined before work starts, dependencies are sequenced rather than discovered, and progress is reported against the plan in terms that let a decision be made while there is still time to make it.
We manage the work, hold suppliers and partners to their commitments, and bring anything needing your decision early enough that it is still a choice, with the decisions themselves staying with you throughout.
A market entry
The launch runs across compliance, supply, systems and people, and it needs one party accountable for the trading date.
A system change
Implementation touches every team and the business still has to trade while the change is going in.
A capacity gap
The project is understood and your team is fully committed to running the business day to day.
What the work covers
Six things a project needs in place to finish on the date it was given.
The work covers definition, sequencing, governance and the day to day management that keeps a plan connected to what is actually happening.
Scope definition
What the project covers, what it explicitly does not, and what completion looks like in terms that can be tested rather than argued.
Plan and sequencing
The order the work has to happen in, the dependencies between parts, and the lead times that determine the critical path.
Governance
Who decides what, at what point, and what gets escalated, agreed before the first decision has to be made under pressure.
Supplier and partner management
Commitments held, progress verified rather than reported, and issues raised while there is still room to resolve them.
Risk and dependency tracking
What could move the date, how likely it is, and what the mitigation is, reviewed on a set cadence rather than when it surfaces.
Reporting
Progress against plan, in a format your leadership can act on, at a frequency matched to how quickly things are moving.
How an engagement runs
Three stages, and you can stop after any of them.
Each stage is scoped and delivered on its own terms, so the decision to continue is made with the previous stage in hand rather than ahead of it.
Definition
- Objective and success measures established with you
- Scope agreed, including what sits outside it
- Stakeholders, decision rights and governance defined
- Dependencies mapped and the critical path identified
- Plan documented and signed off before work starts
Delivered as a standalone piece that stands on its own and gives you a plan you can run internally.
Delivery
- Day to day management of the plan and the people in it
- Suppliers and partners held to agreed commitments
- Issues resolved or escalated against the governance agreed
- Regular reporting against plan, budget and risk
- Scope changes assessed and decided rather than absorbed
Scoped after definition, so the commitment is defined in full before any work begins.
Close and handover
- Completion tested against the measures agreed at the outset
- Documentation completed and transferred to the owning team
- Outstanding items assigned with owners and dates
- Review of what the project produced against what it promised
- Handover to business as usual
Included in a delivery engagement, and available on its own where a project needs bringing to a defined close.
Who this is for
Built for businesses that need the work managed, not another meeting.
This service suits businesses with a project that matters commercially and a team already fully committed to running the business. The management of the work sits with us, and the decisions that shape it stay with you.
What we bring is retail delivery experience. We have run these projects from inside operating businesses, which means the plan accounts for the fact that the business still has to trade while the work is going in.
- The project spans several functions and needs coordinating across all of them
- A trading or launch date is committed and the path to it is not defined
- Your team is capable and fully committed to running the business
- Suppliers and partners are involved and their commitments need holding
- You want progress reported in terms you can make decisions from
Start here
Tell us what needs to be delivered and by when.
A scoping conversation establishes what the project actually covers, where the dependencies sit, and whether definition or full delivery is the right place to start.