Bio UK

Project and Portfolio Management as a Service (PPMaaS)

Our PPMaaS provides modular project and programme governance and strategic portfolio management services, helping organisations successfully deliver digital transformation and business change. We cover the full lifecycle from business case and portfolio prioritisation, through project planning and delivery, service transition, adoption and ROI tracking, across Waterfall, Agile and Hybrid methodologies.

Features

• Modular approach, from basic project management to portfolio governance
• Flexible resource models, from “in-house top up” to full outsource
• Flexible commercial models, from “pay-per-hour” to outcome based
• Waterfall, Agile and Hybrid project methodologies from accredited specialists
• Structured Portfolio planning, linking strategic planning to practical delivery
• Delivered with on-site or remote resources
• Practical experience of presales scoping, project delivery and service transition
• Business outcomes and adoption focused, not just technical milestone-oriented
• Expertise in supporting the “pre-project” design and planning stages
• Packaged processes and documentation, or adoption of customer standards

Benefits

• Highly cost effective “pay-per-use” compared to traditional contracting
• Proven processes adapted to customer environments, leveraging Bio’s experience
• Complements in-house capability and capacity for seamless, efficient delivery
• Secures RoI by tracking and driving benefits realisation
• Drives up productivity and return on organisation’s premium/critical resources
• Provides insightful Management Information to underpin business decision making
• Brings insight from working with Cloud Providers, Telcos and End-Users
• Familiarity with Public Sector reduces onboarding and accelerates Bio impact
• “As a Service” delivery model mitigates IR35 compliance burden
• Bio expertise and practical experience drive operational process/quality improvement

£40.00 to £155.00 a unit an hour

Service documents

• Pricing document

  PDF

• Service definition document

  PDF

• Terms and conditions

  PDF

Request an accessible format

If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need versions of these documents in a more accessible format, email the supplier at gcloud@bio.uk.com. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.

Framework

G-Cloud 14

Service ID

631174661553845

Contact

Sales Team
0845 003 9092
gcloud@bio.uk.com

Planning

• Planning service: Yes
• How the planning service works: Bio’s Project, Programme and Portfolio Managers can assist with implementation planning before and after a purchasing decision has been made.; ; Pre-purchase, we provide advice and guidance on the practicalities of how delivery activities, resources, risks and outcomes of cloud transformation projects and programmes can be managed, ensuring that a business case is realistic in terms of approach, effort and timescales. We also ensure that business outcomes, adoption plans and benefits realisation metrics are clearly understood and documented, such that the decision to progress with an investment is on a sound footing. ; ; Our portfolio management methodology ensures that priorities and dependencies between complementary and competing initiatives are understood, and projects are approved on an achievable basis with clear delivery and resource plans.; ; Post purchase decision, we provide expertise in the pre-kick off planning of a project, ensuring key stages and detailed activity plans are captured. This links together technology milestones, user adoption activities and business outcomes, enabling benefits realisation to be assured and tracked. We bring our insight from working with multiple organisations, across both service providers and end users, to ensure that wherever possible, risks are identified, and mitigations planned in advance of project initiation.
• Planning service works with specific services: No

Training

• Training service provided: Yes
• How the training service works: In addition to operational project and portfolio management services, Bio also provides consulting and training services aimed at assessing the maturity of an organisation’s own Programme and Project Management capability (skills, processes and tools), compared to industry best practice for managing digital transformation and cloud migrations, and then helping those organisations move up the maturity scale.; ; Formal training in project and portfolio management can be provided, on a catalogue or bespoke basis. However, organisations frequently implement, embed and sustain change more effectively through “hands on” operational engagement with Bio; we can share practical “real world” experience rather than “textbook theory”. These learning and development assignments are structured around specific processes or operational areas, and involve “on the job” coaching, mentoring and knowledge sharing, whilst tracking improvement in quality and output of the in-house teams.; ; As an example, a local authority engaged Bio to undertake a fundamental review and improvement programme for both its strategic portfolio management and its project and programme governance. These were capabilities which it needed to evolve in order to ensure delivery of cloud migration and wider digital transformation strategies within the authority. The engagement was subsequently expanded to provide interim leadership and coaching of these teams.
• Training is tied to specific services: No

Setup and migration

• Setup or migration service available: Yes
• How the setup or migration service works: Our scope is modular and flexible to dovetail with customers’ needs and can provide governance, control and quality assurance at every stage of migrating to the cloud for the first time, or between cloud services, including:; ; - Managing the business case process, including aligning to organisational strategy, capturing business requirements and ROI criteria; ; - Capturing “user adoption” expectations, challenges and demands, how progress will be measured and barriers mitigated; ; - Validating project delivery approach, resources and risks during the purchase and planning cycles, ensuring budgets and timescales are realistic; ; - Scheduling project delivery within a strategic portfolio, including dependencies, priorities and forecasting supply and demand of resources; ; - Designing the project delivery approach prior to initiation, whether Agile, Waterfall or Hybrid, and ensuring that the lower-level planning is pragmatic and appropriately defined; ; - Tracking and managing activities, progress, resources, stakeholders, risks and issues throughout delivery to ensure that progress towards not only technical goals, but also user adoption and business outcomes, are achieved; ; - Providing meaningful management information to project stakeholders and upwards to portfolio management; ; - Structured and effective handover to in-life operation; ; - Formal closedown and lessons learned, driving continuous improvement; ; - Tracking benefits realisation
• Setup or migration service is for specific cloud services: No

Quality assurance and performance testing

• Quality assurance and performance testing service: Yes
• How the quality assurance and performance testing works: Bio’s PPMaaS is based upon:; ; - Clearly defining objectives; ; - Creating a realistic plan to deliver those objectives; ; - Tracking progress against the plan; ; - Managing and resolving issues; ; - Ensuring achievement and formal outcome sign-off ; ; - Reviewing performance and lessons learned to drive ongoing continuous improvement.; ; Whilst the methodologies differ, these core Quality Assurance (QA) principles are common to Agile, Waterfall and Hybrid.; ; Bio’s QA starts with producing a clear scope and plan against which to baseline progress and measure the achievement of outcomes. We ensure the project goals, expected benefits, timescales, approach, resource and adoption plans are clearly defined, reviewed and realistic.; ; Through regular cycles of meetings and reporting, Bio ensures the project team and stakeholders are all clear on their responsibilities and accountabilities, and report back regularly on progress, risks and issues. Bio will escalate and manage issues with stakeholders and senior responsible owners, as appropriate, to drive resolution.; ; Test plans are validated against project deliverables to ensure they appropriately validate specified features and functionality. Test results are formally reviewed to identify exceptions and manage these through to resolution.; ; Projects are formally closed down, including recording residual defects and lessons learned, to improve future design and delivery.

Security testing

• Security services: No

Ongoing support

• Ongoing support service: No

Service scope

• Service constraints: Bio’s core business helps our customers manage digital transformation and business change, from small projects through to complex, multi-faceted programmes.; ; Our service portfolio is modular, flexible, and unconstrained. It includes operational and consulting services across:; ; - Business case management; ; - Project and programme management; ; - Strategic portfolio management; ; - Service transition and service design; ; - Adoption and success planning; ; - Business change management; ; - Product lifecycle management.; ; The scope of specific engagements is tailored to each customer’s requirements and documented as a baseline reference.; ; We are technology and vendor agnostic, complementing service providers and end users alike.

User support

• Email or online ticketing support: Email or online ticketing
• Support response times: Many of our customers choose to undergo our engagements partly or wholly using remote resources, with collaboration through email, phone, video and instant messaging.; ; We typically respond to emails relating to live projects within one working hour or less, although when projects are at a key stage of delivery we further reduce this timeframe for critical activities.; ; We respond to non-project requests to within four working hours or less.; ; We are also flexible with regard to hours of working. Whilst many of our projects are active during normal business hours, we can also provide support during weekends and evenings.
• User can manage status and priority of support tickets: No
• Phone support: Yes
• Phone support availability: 9 to 5 (UK time), 7 days a week
• Web chat support: No
• Support levels: Through our modular PPMaaS portfolio, we tailor support services to meet customers’ specific requirements. ; ; With regard to project management, this includes:; ; - Business case creation; ; - Providing subject matter expertise into solution design and vendor selection; ; - Managing projects from “kick-off” to closedown; ; - Managing ongoing product lifecycles.; ; We also provide end-to-end programme management across multiple workstreams, including those delivered by in-house resources and third parties.; ; We provide full portfolio management, tracking and managing requirements at a strategic level as they come into the demand pipeline, monitoring health, dependencies and key risks across all live projects, tracking benefits realisation, and managing forward forecasting and planning of resources.; ; All of these capabilities can be delivered as “operational services” (undertaking tasks and activities on customer’s behalf) or as “advisory services” (helping evolve and improve customers’ own in-house teams and processes).; ; As an example, we were engaged by a premium retailer to review their project and portfolio management capability and design a “best practice” framework. We then took on and operated their projects and PMO whilst the changes were embedded, before handing it back to then as a transformed operation.; ; Hourly rates vary from £40 to £155 excluding VAT, depending on scope.

Resellers

• Supplier type: Not a reseller

Staff security

• Staff security clearance: Staff screening not performed
• Government security clearance: Up to Security Clearance (SC)

Standards and certifications

• ISO/IEC 27001 certification: No
• ISO 28000:2007 certification: No
• CSA STAR certification: No
• PCI certification: No
• Cyber essentials: No
• Cyber essentials plus: No
• Other security certifications: Yes
• Any other security certifications:
  • Annual external online Data Protection and Cyber Security awareness training
  • Screening to SC level for specific client engagement

Social Value

• Social Value:

  Social Value

  • Fighting climate change
  • Covid-19 recovery
  • Tackling economic inequality
  • Equal opportunity
  • Wellbeing

  Fighting climate change

  As an eco-conscious organisation, Bio is committed to minimising/reducing the total number of GHGs (greenhouse gases) it produces through its day-to-day operations and fully supports the UK Government’s Carbon Reduction Policy and its ambitions to achieve carbon net zero by 2050.; ; Cloud services have an extremely low carbon footprint and, by adopting a fully cloud based strategy, Bio has moved away from costly, inefficient legacy IT infrastructure; as a result our legacy servers and associated equipment racks have been decommissioned. This enables the organisation to innovate and scale long-term, but also forms a key part of our Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity strategy. We actively promote the use of cloud-based tooling and technologies (including Microsoft Teams) to reduce travel needs and minimise carbon emissions, and facilitate quicker, more productive and collaborative meetings with key stakeholders. As a result, environmental sustainability is built into the delivery of our G-Cloud services, eliminating hardware, paper, printers and associated materials. We also make use of electronic signatures for all contractual documentation – both customer facing and internal – which further reduces use of printing and paper, removes the requirement for physical document storage, and shortens the time and effort required by all parties to achieve contractual completion. ; ; Bio’s employees are all home-based and deliver the majority of services remotely and on-line. As a result, Bio has no permanent office space, and minimal employee travel other than that necessary to meet with customers for “on-site” commitments or essential internal workshops for goals that cannot feasibly be achieved remotely. This further minimises our environmental impact, and also reduces operational costs.; ; We also work with our customers to help them to further develop their own sustainability strategies to achieve a net zero carbon footprint through their business processes and in the services they supply.

  Covid-19 recovery

  Bio is an SME service provider and is therefore acutely aware of the negative impacts that COVID-19 has had on smaller businesses and the UK economy. Consequently, we’re fully committed to supporting the UK Government’s recovery efforts; to help businesses and communities manage and recover from the impacts of COVID-19 and to create employment, re-training and return to work opportunities.; ; In the context of COVID-19, Bio has invested heavily in the physical and mental health and wellbeing of its workforce, implementing effective social distancing, remote and flexible working arrangements. All employees were provided additional equipment (e.g. monitors, keyboard and mouse, etc.) to support home working and given a £250 budget to purchase any items such as office furniture that could further improve their working conditions and comfort. This approach has enabled employees who are personally affected, or have family members, within vulnerable groups, to continue working and delivering services to our customers whilst effectively shielding.; ; A number of Bio’s services have been used by its customers to directly assist them in their own COVID recovery strategies. For example, the Enterprise Portfolio Review Service has been used by a Local Authority to assess planned activities and re-prioritise effort to focus on projects essential to underpin COVID recovery, and take into account the impact of key resource absences. We also had a team of PMO and Project Management resources supporting the delivery of a “Build Back Better” strategic COVID-19 recovery and operational improvement programme for a major NHS Trust.; ; To further support the local communities in which we operate recover from COVID-19, Bio also makes a substantial donation each quarter to a charity, with a different charity nominated by employees each quarter.

  Tackling economic inequality

  A substantial proportion of Bio’s employees and management team live in the North West, North East and Yorkshire, and as such, Bio recognises and understands the importance of tackling economic inequality and levelling up the UK.; ; To support relevant sector-related skills growth, Bio continues to recruit its workforce from the local areas in which we operate. Our inclusive and accessible recruitment practices and homeworking model provide equality of opportunity for disadvantaged and/or disabled people into employment. Where possible, we will also provide support to staff for educational attainment relevant to their role and future aspirations, including training schemes that address skills gaps and result in recognised qualifications. However we also recognise the importance of “on the job” coaching and mentoring alongside formal training in order to develop the capability, experience and confidence of our people and enable then to progress their careers with Bio. We have multiple examples of taking on employees in more junior roles and progressing them into higher capability positions. Operating an in-house “talent pipeline” in this way not only enables us to continue offering opportunities to less experienced individuals, it also provides benefits to our business, and in turn, our customers, in terms of increased loyalty, job satisfaction and reduced attrition.; ; Further, we fully support flexible working, with many of our employees working flexible hours during the day, and, in many cases, 4-day weeks. This enables individuals to balance employment with personal commitments such as childcare, helping to ensure potential employees are not excluded from the workforce if not able to work within traditional patterns. This flexibility helps tackle economic inequality, but also brings value to Bio and our customers by widening the available pool of talent and experience that we can recruit into our business and deploy into customer operations.

  Equal opportunity

  Bio is fully committed to breaking down barriers, eliminating discrimination and ensuring equal opportunities and access for all, regardless of their protected characteristics, including disabled people. We embed these values in our business policies and practices across all areas of employment; for example, recruitment, training, career development and promotion.; ; Our inclusive and accessible recruitment practices provide equality of opportunity for disabled people into employment. For example, by publishing job advertisements that avoid language which might deter people with disabilities from applying, we will help secure more jobs for disabled people in our workforce. We also provide reasonable adjustments and additional support for employees with physical, sensory and hidden disabilities, such as purchasing specialist equipment including supportive chairs and standing desks.; ; To continually identify and tackle inequality in employment, skills and pay, we monitor our workforce to ensure it proportionately reflects the diversity of the communities in which we operate. For example, over 50% of Bio’s workforce, (including management roles) are female. We actively recruit across all age groups; and our commitment in this respect is reflected in the wide range of ages across our employees at all levels. We undertake equal pay audits, and also have a number of robust measures in place to support in-work progression and help people in our workforce to move into higher paid work by developing new skills relevant to Bio’s service portfolio. We are implementing Personal Development Plans for each employee, tailored to their career development aspirations and underpinned by personal incentive rewards.; ; Bio works closely with our upstream and downstream supply chain partners to mitigate and manage modern slavery risks through policy, governance and procurement practices. Our own pre-employment checks include appropriate due diligence activities to identify, assess, monitor and mitigate the risks of modern slavery in the delivery of services.

  Wellbeing

  At Bio, health and wellbeing are more than just enablers of employee engagement and organisational performance. We recognise that promoting awareness of/supporting health and wellbeing in the workplace and wider community can make a real difference to employees’ lives, the economy, and society as a whole. We are therefore fully committed to developing and embedding health and wellbeing in the organisation’s culture and the delivery of our services.; ; We invest heavily in the physical and mental health and wellbeing of our workforce. We have a qualified Mental Health First Aider (MHFA) within the team. Our MHFA not only responds to requests for advice and counselling from the team, they also proactively promote a wellbeing agenda, through regular e-mail hints and tips, slots at our online team meetings, and sending monthly newsletters to all employees to increase awareness/understanding of the importance of wellbeing.; ; Our management team holds regular 1-2-1 calls with team members to maintain a positive and constructive personal relationship with them such that our employees are more readily able to raise concerns and issues. Whilst we endeavour to reduce travel under our climate change agenda, we recognise the value that face-to-face interaction can have in supporting wellbeing, building team spirit and mitigating the risk of isolation. With this in mind, we hold “all hands” company update meetings twice a year in a central location.; ; Bio has also invested in a Health, Wellbeing and Employee Benefits package for all employees, provided by “Reward Gateway”. This solution provides an extensive range of online tutorials, courses and advice for health and wellbeing, a confidential telephone counselling service, and discounts against a wide range of shopping and entertainment venues. Bio also provides all employees with private medical insurance.

Pricing

• Price: £40.00 to £155.00 a unit an hour
• Discount for educational organisations: No

Service documents

• Pricing document

  PDF

• Service definition document

  PDF

• Terms and conditions

  PDF

Request an accessible format

If you use assistive technology (such as a screen reader) and need versions of these documents in a more accessible format, email the supplier at gcloud@bio.uk.com. Tell them what format you need. It will help if you say what assistive technology you use.