Client Challenge

NCCC is the 3rd-largest CC system in the country with 58 campuses. It is navigating a number of challenges affecting educational institutions across the country, particularly community college systems. NCCC worked for several months on a strategic plan designed to be ambitious but achievable. The challenge was implementing the plan: translating and ‘chunking’ the strategic initiatives into actionable projects with practical timelines, ownership, management, oversight, and reporting for System and Board insight on progress. Moreover, the entire organization needed to understand the strategy and have the confidence that they could make it happen.

Our Approach

Our goal was to help the client build a project management function. These are traditionally found in IT departments, but our version was designed for non-technical personnel across NCCC’s staff who would work as project managers and project team members alongside their regular roles. After assessing staff understanding of the strategic plans and of project management (PM), we designed operational infrastructure robust enough to manage the initiatives but simple enough to be implemented with PM beginners.

We trained the respective initiative leads on a range of PM skills using tools they currently had to avoid implementation delay.

Once the initiative leads were trained on project and tool basics we worked with each team on project intake (e.g., scope, timeline, risks, etc.).  Our team moved quickly from teaching and coaching to monitoring as the leaders stepped forward. In parallel we worked with our client to develop basic health and status dashboards for use in ongoing reporting to leadership.

The Impact

The initiative leads and their teams gained agency as they developed project timelines, understood roles and responsibilities, and created success metrics. They gained confidence and momentum as their knowledge grew, and gained insight as they monitored and reported on their progress toward successfully delivering the strategic initiatives. 

We are committed to ensuring clients aren’t dependent on our continued presence. Our final work with this client was using the initiative success to-date to build a case for PM resources.