Strategic business alignment enablement through P3M

The November event of APMHK was held at Royal Hong Kong Yacht Club, Kellett Island on 17th November 2015.  The interesting event entitled “Strategic Business Alignment Enablement through P3M” was presented by Mr. Lui Sieh, Regional Director (Asia Middle East) of G4S, the largest international security solution group.  The presentation was about strategic business alignment, through successful delivery of project, programme and portfolio management (P3M), to achieve project success.

Lui Sieh holds a Bachelor of Science degree from Carnegie Mellon University, USA and a Juris Doctorate from Brooklyn Law School, USA. Lui is a commercially focused IT and project management executive.  He specialized in delivering business and technological transformation through pragmatic developments of innovative computing technologies.  At G4S, Lui leads a regional IT team, enabling on-line business transformation across regions and counties covering solution development and implementation region-wide.  Previously, he served at British American Tobacco across various functions in Asia Pacific.  He led functional IT and PMO teams delivering and executing complex business and IT projects.

Lui began the presentation with the huge challenges faced by business people in today’s changing world.  There are challenging growth opportunities, and at the same time, there are challenging cost containment environments.  Over the past decades, focus has been on the skills and techniques to maximize the project success, but it is indeed difficult to achieve more profit.  More recently, there has been increasing recognition of the importance attached to people, process and technology to ensure that the benefits are successfully managed and realized and that they add value to alignment with the business goals.  Business people need to react to the changing business and legislative environment and eliminate reliance on inflexible and incabable systems and processes.

Lui equated more growth and cost reduction to increased profit.  Business people need to align the business strategy with the IT enablers if business is to be successful.  Information is an enabler for business process.  He highlighted the technology enablers, the new technology of servers, networks and infrastructure that helps IT develop complete and consistent designs for business processes and generate IT solutions. 

Lui went on to discuss the change management from the perspectives of the employer and the employee.  Employees usually it find very hard to accept changes and they are likely to resist changes.  Every executive is a change manager (a change manager is a project manager, or vice versa), who is forced to work with a challenge.  In this connection, it is important to understand the current business situation to build the right Project Management Office (PMO) construct that could work well for the organization.  Bodies of knowledge have been developed to help senior management in guiding their organizations through a program of change initiatives.  One of the PMO functions is to ease communication and change management via the p3m standards.  Change management is crucial to ensure sustainability of project success.  If changes are to be successful, we need to get the right people with right level of understanding, find the right techniques and tools, and use the right processes and standard systems.  Mr. Lui then went much further to the techniques and tools for success.

Each aspect of P3M fulfils a different function and different skill set.  First, we need to know the executives’ incentives, in particular, what drives his/her behavior.  Second, effective management of all 3 is essential if the organization is to run projects to meet the business goals.  Business strategies should be formulated into a company portfolio, portfolio into programs, and programs into projects.  Governance model should be fit for the organizational maturity.  Further, the requirements for good knowledge and understanding of financial management also play an important role.  We need to understand the Charts of Accounts and financial reporting.  Regular reviews through Exco Meetings, steering committees, etc. are essential to get projects completed within budget and on time.

Joe Wong
Hong Kong branch committee member