Standard Chartered PMO, Global

Programme leadership

As part of the evolution of Standard Chartered’s existing outsourced strategic partnership, there was an opportunity to build an independent programme management office (PMO) to oversee the built-asset programme.

We were brought on board with an initial mandate to set out a globally consistent governance and assurance framework, ensuring that all property projects and programmes are consistently reported and delivered, but we also had the much larger task of delivering a suite of strategic initiatives to drive innovation.

Through our dedicated focus to driving improvements and efficiencies for the bank in digital, procurement and cost management, we have secured a total return on investment of 45 percent over the past four years.

Building a digital picture

Our key focus has been to lead Standard Chartered Bank property’s digital transformation by implementing a new delivery model, centred around best practice information management and building information modelling (BIM).

We have established information requirements, standardised data structures, built BIM object libraries, preconfigured spaces, transitioned the design team from a traditional to BIM-centric design process and launched a global cloud-based common data environment, enabling collaborative design and safeguarding the bank’s data. All of which has resulted in the same, upskilled team, to deliver 72 percent more work and to do so 18 percent quicker than before. This new model has delivered 39 percent in cost savings and 22 percent reduction in time to deliver.

We have 3D scanned the bank’s 20 most significant buildings to build a digital picture of its estate for future redesign, to excite and engage customers and colleagues, monitor progress of construction and provide high definition 3D models. We estimate that the 3D scans have enabled the bank to avoid 1.85 metric tonnes of carbon through virtual fly-throughs, reducing a large number of international flights to visit site.

Next steps are to embark on how we can leverage the digitised project information to support carbon and cost estimates, leverage generative design to design test fits for early stakeholder engagement and develop a digital asset information management strategy to connect asset data to the physical sensory network to enable unparalleled end-user experiences.

Driving process improvements to deliver greater value at pace

We are delivering a programme of more than 50 office fit-out and retrofit projects globally. Delivering projects for highly regulated businesses, such as banks, requires a considerable amount of supply-chain preparation. One of our major breakthrough innovations has been the creation of a dedicated procurement and contracts team responsible for pre-screening contractors to enable rapid and safe project mobilisation and establishing strategic frameworks to enable rapid deployment of consultant teams.

Critical to a programme has been leveraging volume to negotiate better savings. To date we have helped Standard Chartered to secure $13m of procurement savings, with a further $16m to be secured over the next two years.

Fundamental to our role as PMO is to support our broader consultant supply chain by delivering over 400 hours of training per annum and increasing average project assurance scores to 95 percent, 18 percent higher compared to our inception in 2019 through introduction of a rigorous stage gate process.

We have supported the bank’s retail-design team to deliver design packs twice as fast with half the resource, overall reducing costs by 75 percent. We have also enabled the design teams for offices to collaborate significantly faster through the common data environment, and we’re targeting a 50 percent reduction in the timescales for main contractor procurement.