Pathfinder – A GPS for your Programs

Wouldn’t it be good to get a formula that suggests the optimum way for you to deliver your programs? Rather than just rely on what you’ve always done or what everyone else seems to be doing, consider the power of an algorithm that is based on thousands of years of accumulated best practice and proven project delivery. Well Seven Consulting have created that algorithm.

We are big believers in choosing the right horses for courses at Seven Consulting. So, when new delivery techniques arrive, we welcome them, but we have learnt that they aren’t always the answer to all your delivery challenges. Generally, just some of them!

With no common singular approach to ensuring delivery success, at Seven we don’t hire consultants with limited and narrow focus, we hire and rely on experienced delivery executives that have shown they can succeed in a wide variety of different project development environments.

This has resulted in a very experienced permanent workforce in Seven, with 1000’s of years of successful delivery experience that allow us to continually learn from each other and share these valuable learnings with our clients.

Over the last few years, we commenced work with our internal tools team to explore if we could develop a tool that uses algorithms and decision trees to look at the characteristics of both a program and the client’s organization to initially determine whether individual projects should be delivered in an agile, traditional (waterfall) or blended manner.

Seven have successfully codified our 1000’s of years of experience on how to deliver programs.

We call this the Pathfinder. 

To date this has proven to be extremely powerful in aiding delivery and over time, we’ve added many more features, such as;

• Presenting the risks with the suggested approach and their suggested mitigants, as while most program or organizational characteristics might support either agile or traditional as the best approach, you need to address the characteristics that don’t align, to ensure they don’t undermine your approach.
• We added additional elements around agile/traditional agnostic elements to complete the delivery approach. For example, while parallel runs might be required, it’s not an agile/traditional approach. We believe that the tool now recommends over 95% and growing of the necessary deliverables for each program.
• We included an overview of deliverables by phase by functional stream.
• We’ve added access to templates and standards for each recommended deliverable, or the ability to link to an organisations internal repository and standards
• Finally, we included the ability to generate a Microsoft Project or Jira schedule tailored to your project, with all deliverables, review cycles and cross dependencies already populated as an automatic output, structured by phase and workstream saving hours of effort.

With Pathfinder you can have the delivery approach, risks and mitigants, phases, templates and task and dependency populated schedule/Jira board, by simply answering a number of questions around the characteristics of the program and organization. All within 20-30 minutes.

Internally, Seven now use this on over $4bn of programs across our 33 clients and it’s adding lots of value for our client delivery and will help us maintain or grow our year-on-year 98%+ customer satisfaction, which for 2020-2023 sits at 99.1% with an NPS of 57.4

Pathfinder offers a range of unique benefits to those looking to optimize their project delivery approach, helping you to achieve better results, faster.

From Corporate, ePMO, SME to Individual plans, we have a solution for every need. Get started today.

To find out more or request a demo by one of our experts please email pathfinder@sevenconsulting.com