The Unipart Project Delivery System (PDS) is one of the key tools of the Unipart Way. It enables us to deliver significant business change projects on time and within budget.
This has been important in delivering operational aspects of projects through a combination of Prince 2 methodology and a series of ‘gateways’ that have been developed in-house and which ensure all relevant aspects of a project stage are in place before proceeding to the next stage.
However, it has become increasingly important to explicitly identify and understand the corporate responsibility impacts of projects early in their lifecycle, and be able to develop mitigation actions if required. In particular this focuses on the Safety, Health & Environmental factors, as well as Community, Supplier and Customer impacts.
A team was put in place to develop an impact assessment to include these CR impacts, as part of an early project gateway. This provided a checklist of questions covering legislative and process aspects, and embodied expert input via help text, so that non-specialist project staff would find it easier to understand the impacts e.g. of specialist legislation.
This was tested out rigorously on a number of projects and feedback incorporated before implementing it as part of Unipart’s standard Project Delivery System. It is now available to be used by all employees through Unipart’s knowledge management system, Unipart Way Online.