PMO delivery on a cross-border IT separation programme

The situation

An IT landscape being separated across entities in the energy sector, spanning several business units and regions, with parallel business and technical workstreams, internal teams and multiple external IT vendors — all running to a fixed year-end deadline.

The mandate

Forging Ways supports project management in taking the programme through from prepare and build to migration, cutover and hypercare — holding the plan together and keeping a large, distributed group of stakeholders moving in the same direction.

The work

• Own the project plan and manage it dynamically as dependencies and specialist availability shift
• Maintain activity, risk and issue logs across all workstreams
• Produce Steering Committee material and prepare agendas for vendor meetings
• Coordinate internal stakeholders, IT vendors and the PM team through each programme phase
• Prepare end-user communications ahead of cutover

Where the complexity sits

On a programme this size the constraint is rarely the technology.

• Holding a fixed timeline while specialist availability fluctuates across vendors, regions and holiday periods
• Keeping multiple external parties accountable and on schedule without formal authority over them
• Licensing and contractual dependencies that can gate deployment and testing — consistently slower and more complex than expected where several entities are involved
• Managing the plan as a living document rather than a fixed artefact, while still holding vendors to their commitments