Aston Martin Lagonda Ltd

The Client

Aston Martin Lagonda Ltd is one of the most successful and globally known premium manufacturers of sports cars remaining in the UK. In recent years much of the business has enjoyed significant investment resulting in Aston Martin becoming an industry leader in many areas including manufacturing facilities and Dealer networks.

The Challenge

The business came under new ownership in 2007 giving it significant flexibility particularly in relation to its IT systems and processes which had previously been mandated by its parent company. Due to the aggressive time constraints that were agreed for the separation, many of the fixes that were implemented to maintain business continuity were not optimised. Coupled with a historical lack of investment within IT many issues were beginning to surface, exposing the business to risk.

Under new internal management a complete review of the department's Strategic direction, spending plans, internal capability and its ability to support the business was required.

The Pcubed Solution

Pcubed was engaged to base line the current situation within the IT department and support the development of a Strategy and Vision for IT based around Pcubed industry best practice and internal customer feedback. Based upon this strategy it was asked to review all currently proposed work and provide a recommendation for how best to deliver it.

The deliverables for the engagement comprised four key elements:

• Baseline current department constraints by conducting a full budget and resource review
• Support the development of a departmental Strategic Vision and Business Drivers aligned with the Enterprise vision, industry best practice and Customer survey
• Understand Delivery requirements and provide a Project prioritization method using Portfolio Management lite (PfM lite) toolset
• Develop a proposal for restructuring the department based on a clear understanding of the delivery and support requirements

The Benefits

By base lining the departmental constraints, any further decisions around restructuring and delivery could be accurately assessed for achievability.

By conducting a company wide survey to obtain the current perception of the IT delivery capability a baseline for measuring improvement was created as well as providing a corporate wide understanding of what IT needed to achieve.

An IT Strategic vision and supporting business drivers was developed in conjunction with the AML management team to provide a high level direction for all future decision making.

By conducting a full portfolio analysis of the existing business requirements Pcubed provided a consistent mechanism for prioritising project requests and an ability to demonstrate where projects were misaligned with the strategic drivers. This gave a recommendation for which projects should be stopped and in turn showed where nearly £1Million of proposed investment could potentially be saved.

By providing an understanding of the complete portfolio, the resource requirements could be tailored to suit delivery and ongoing service requirements. This also showed clearly where specific resources were lacking or retraining was required.

Results

• A jointly developed IT Vision and Strategy against which all future decisions could be based
• A full Portfolio analysis based around the above strategic drivers using PfM lite toolset
• A full understanding of budget constraints and resource availability to deliver the portfolio
• A proposed organizational structure to deliver as much of the Portfolio as possible while supporting the other delivery requirements of the department based on industry best practice