Magic Milestones' project manager Hazel Sharpe worked in partnership with The TicketSellers to deliver a new e commerce site that brings together some of the UK`s leading promoters and event organisers to provide a wide selection of great ticket deals.

Visit The TicketSellers website.

Having recently read a post on linkedin by leading project management author Peter Taylor – the Lazy Project Manager, saying …“It is said that a project is one small step for a project sponsor and one giant leap for the project manager. Wouldn’t we all feel so much better if we knew that the project sponsors’ one critical small step made sure that the project manager’s giant leap offered a safe and secure final landing? It has been my experience that the skill profile of project managers continues to grow, and more and more organisations are developing project managers in a disciplined and mature manner. But the same cannot always be said of project sponsors, many wrongly believe that the project sponsor is just a figurehead that is never called to active duty and may sponsors have received no training or support in their role.”

Now Peter don’t get me wrong I support the plight of the project sponsor having been one on a number of occasions but in the agile world… in comparison to scrum masters say, there is a lack of personal development support and guidance for product owners and it is needed urgently… at MM our training and mentoring provides support for Product Owners and  represents real value for people acting in such a key role.

Following a lengthy competitive bidding process run by the West Midlands Strategic Health Authority, a consortium led by Maverick Television (the producers of the TV series Embarrassing Bodies and Embarrassing Bodies Live) was awarded a 5 year contract in September 2009 to develop a ground breaking digital service with the NHS, to provide online health resources and information, accessible to NHS staff and the public in the West Midlands.  Maverick is leading a consortium of health and digital organisations to deliver a unique interactive information service “known as NHS local”.

Maverick engaged a Launch manager to develop the digital service but soon recognised the need for a Programme Manager to provide an overall plan for the implementation of the phase as well as providing support to manage communication, training, ongoing support and business change procedures and process development for the new digital service.

Commencing early 2010 Magic milestones were engaged by Maverick Television to provide the Programme and Project Management skills required to roll out the NHS local service. At that time there were two important deadlines looming; an imminent soft launch of the digital service and in little over 12 weeks the hard launch live into the public domain.The MM team assessed the landscape and provided services four areas:

• Consultancy for the design of programme level; governance, performance management and benefits realisation
• Consultancy for the set up and management of a Project Management Office (PMO)
• Hands on project management of the soft and hard launches of the NHS local sites
• On-going programme management and strategic project portfolio management

The NHS local web site launched on time in the public domain on 30^th June 2010 to great acclaim, with its unique mixture of high quality video, local health related news and applications. At the same time an integrated ecosystem was launched providing access to NHS content through social media channels and 3^rd party content delivery. Visitor numbers continued to increase at a rate of 30% throughout the remainder of the year.

Recently the MM team helped Maverick TV with Consultancy to support the development of a unique project management framework combining PRINCE2 processes (for NHS compliance) and Scrum methodology (for Maverick development).

Now with a tried and tested project management framework in place, Maverick TV have continued to manage the on time delivery of a complex 50+ project portfolio which includes; web development, hardware deployment, mobile applications development and so on.

“The best thing about Magic Milestones’ consultants is that they are easy going and collaborative … it has been a great experience working with them” Helen Jenks - Operations Manager, Maverick Television.