Wachter Consulting


Areas of Practice

Wachter Consulting provides a spectrum of project management consulting services.  These services may be focused on the entire project organization, or an individual project within the organization. 

Organizational Assessments
Wachter provides organization assessments to help target areas for improvement.  Organizational assessments identify project system gaps as well as target and prioritize proposed solutions.  Wachter’s Maturity Model for Business Project Management has proven successful in identifying focus areas for individual organizations and avoiding a one-size-fits-all solution.  This process has proven very effective in providing a roadmap for organizational improvement over a 2-to-5 year planning horizon. 

Portfolio Management and Project Delivery Process Development
Leading project organizations achieve significant improvements in project performance from formal portfolio management and project delivery processes.  The drivers for creating or re-engineering a portfolio management or project delivery process may include:

  • Improving investment portfolio management and performance
  • Improving the cost and/or schedule effectiveness of projects
  • Establishing a standardized process for project selection, development and execution across an organization because of challenges associated with harmonizing multiple legacy companies, assimilating merged or acquired companies or organization improvement initiatives

We do not provide one-size-fits-all solutions, we tailor the solution to reflect the business model, corporate decision-making style, and industry type.


Project Team Facilitation
Alignment and team building are overused expressions that have lost value in many organizations.  However, when conducted properly, these concepts can make a company's project delivery process come alive and deliver value to the company and project team immediately.  Wachter has designed and tested workshop content that have helped organizations institutionalize these key elements of their process.

Independent, third-party facilitation often results in the right questions being asked and answered.  Our project experience means that the facilitator role we take on can represent a spectrum from strict facilitator, to catalyst, to coach.  Further, our methodologies ensure proper advance preparation, meeting participation, consistency in meeting processes and rapid follow-through on meeting results.  

 

Independent Project Assessments
Business-critical projects often have aggressive project objectives with corresponding business and project risks that could have a major impact on the ultimate business results.  Management of these risks requires a disciplined, realistic and unbiased process to identify, assess, analyze and mitigate those risks that pose the most serious threat to achieving the project objectives.

Project sponsors and project teams, by their very nature, are optimistic about their chances for success.  Owners and contractors generally find it difficult to understand and appreciate the risks faced by the other party.  The best way to effectively manage risk is with an independent, unbiased, expert third party to identify and assess risks, and provide a suggested roadmap for mitigation.

An effective, Independent Project Assessment will maximize the probability for success by proactively addressing the most critical risk factors. 

 

Integrated Project Cost and Schedule Risk Analysis
For business-critical projects where cost and/or schedule is a priority, it is essential to evaluate the project risks and quantitatively assess the impact of these risks on the project cost estimate and project schedule.  Our Integrated Cost and Schedule Risk Analysis methodology provides the project team linkage between the qualitative risk assessment and the quantitative risk analysis. 

 

Blended Training Solutions
Effective project management facilitates the horizontal integration of work across organizations that are traditionally vertically oriented.  We focus on providing blended training solutions which are designed to be time effective and inclusive of the entire cross-functional team.  In the past 5 years alone, we have conducted as much training with Project Sponsors and Project Users as we have with Project Managers and Engineers.

Our training solutions include:

  • Web-based training and testing, which is based on the client's project delivery process and can be linked into their e-university
  • Instructor-led training with case studies
  • Instructor-led cross-functional workshop simulations that are based on actual projects so that individuals learn about communications, conflict-resolution, decision-making, as well as project management skills.

These customized solutions enable rapid adoption and target specific roles and skills within the cross-functional project team.

 

Web-Based Knowledge Portals
Project delivery processes, supporting guidelines, roles and responsibilities, project- specific procedure templates, tools, and training can be consolidated using our web-based knowledge portal. This system is built on simple, easy-to-maintain platforms that can grow with the client.
 

A web-based knowledge portal can provide a foundation for organizational improvement by functioning as:

  • An on-demand repository for processes, practices, tools, templates and forms to support project-related activities
  • An on-demand orientation and learning center to support organizational development activities
  • A working warehouse of lessons learned and knowledge management