If you don’t have a PMO in place at all then Harmony provides an immediate benefit in the form of an immediate governance and control structure. The minimum support we need is an on-site administrator who is able to provide administrative support able to resolve issues quickly that are more difficult off-site.
We often get asked the question, “we are not mature enough for a PMO” that’s never really true, the fact that you realise you need a PMO in place to add the assurance and governance processes means any organisation is ready for a PMO. We can quickly provide that level of maturity for organisations that do not have the will or desire to build an in-house team.
Our processes are focused on providing standardised reporting, and insights into progress and hot-spots to enable your decision makers to make the right decisions so, in terms of PMO Maturity, HarmonyPMO is focused at the top levels of the maturity model.
Of course if you do have a PMO in place, then Harmony gives that added peace of mind and independent assurance for your management team.
One of the great benefits of HarmonyPMO is it’s light-touch approach to integration. We don’t require that you modify your existing processes, this is also useful too when you work with third party suppliers, we take the raw information you(and they) give us and give you standardised output that you can trust.
We are in regular communication with your teams so the only thing we do require is access to a phone and access to the data, you can then leave the rest to us to perform the magic.
Our light touch approach to integration means you can benefit from the service provided by Harmony from the first day you start to use our services.
If we do notice your processes are causing you problems we will of course highlight it to you to help ensure your team work in the most efficient way but the decision is yours.
Our employees each sign NDAs for each client engagement and all are already trusted with existing clients. We have been working with clients for many years, our team know the value of the trust you place in us.
All of your data is held securely, treated as confidential and, if you cancel your subscription, we will not retain any data held in the system.
Your data is stored securely in servers located within a secure data centre and everything is encrypted.
Think of us as another office within your organisation. We’re at the end of the phone or email when you need us but more importantly, we are here to help and the only way we can do that is to ensure regular two way communication between your HarmonyPMO team and your delivery management and PMO staff.
Your dedicated HarmonyPMO manager is the primary point of contact between Harmony and your team however our other team members are also available.
We primarily communicate by phone and encrypted email however we also use Windows Communicator if that is installed within your organisation.
On a monthly basis we also like our HarmonyPMO Manager to visit your team, a face-to-face chat is sometimes easier than a phone call.
We ask for 3 months minimum engagement and then a 1 month notice should you wish to cancel.
We charge a fixed price per project per month and the amount we charge is determined by the project value.
The project value enables us to roughly determine the amount of work we need to undertake to ensure you receive an excellent service. We decided to keep things simple to you can plan easily.
If the value of a project exceeds £20m then we apply a simplified scorecard calculation and price specifically for that project.
Our clients tell us that we are extremely competitive when compared to a similar service provided by both contract and in-house staff.
You don’t need to worry about commitment either, our service terms simply require a 3 month minimum commitment then you can, if you wish stop our service giving one month notice. We know sometimes projects and programmes do need to stop at short notice.
We agree with you the level of service you wish us to provide (either full management or governance oversight across each process we support) and we follow pre-defined SLAs for those processes you want us to manage. Each process is scheduled by our team to align with your own project and programme calendar.
We do of course rely on your team to provide the necessary information when it is needed. To ensure this works without any disruption, we send out reminders prior to the required date and chase where necessary. We track timeliness of provision both by your team to us and our team to you, both are made visible through the KPIs.
We will never ask your team to double key information, this is wasteful and time consuming. We take the information, in the format you currently use and where necessary duplicate the information or manage the information on your behalf. We do this to enable us to ensure we can use the data within our own processes, enabling us to track it more easily. As an example, your project/programme manager controls the plan, we only require a small amount of information in the plan such as key milestones which we track. Whilst doing this we do of course oversee the full plan to ensure consistency and quality.
We follow pre-defined SLAs. For example, for the monthly finance projection report, we provide your monthly information within 3 working days of receipt of the financial transactions at a set time in the month. For the project Highlight slide-deck we provide the draft slide-deck with key progress metrics completed to your PM within 2 working days of receipt of all the data. Each process is scheduled by our team to align with your own project and programme calendar.
Our team are based in the UK. Primarily in our London office however we have a smaller satellite office in Southampton.
Harmony is a service provided by Epsilica The service itself is composed of a specialist team, all experts in their particular field (finance, planning, risk management, PMO and experienced Project and programme delivery managers)
Epsilica have been helping organisations streamline their PMO processes for many years helping make them more effective and increasing the PMO maturity. We designed Harmony over a period of two years and have used the service internally to ensure our own programmes work effectively and deliver the goals we set.
Following great customer feedback we decided to provide Harmony as a service back in July 2011. The harmony team is staffed by specialists from Epsilica all have many years specialist knowledge in their chosen field and they of course have the backing of Epsilica and it’s knowledge bank of industry wide experience.
