Enhancing Project Prioritization and Management at AHOVOKS

About AHOVOKS

As an agency within the education and training policy domain, AHOVOKS offers a wide range of products and services that support lifelong and life-wide learning in Flanders. They do this in 3 different domains. The first are the “customer-oriented” services such as organizing exams, awarding study grants, recognizing foreign diplomas and the role as social secretariat of colleges and adult education centres. The 2nd domain is carrying out institutional tasks such as funding colleges, universities and adult education centres and registering their training offerings. Finally, they are also responsible for a number of more policy-oriented assignments such as the development of professional qualifications, educational objectives, training pathways and evc standards.
They do all this with around 250 people, working in both operational departments and support services such as IT.

Discover how AHOVOKS experiences working with threon:

The complete interview

With Peter Parmentier, administrator-general of AHOVOKS

Thanks to threon we have a solid framework to determine which projects should be developed as a priority which allows us to make more conscious and substantiated choices. As management we are more and better informed about the impact of certain choices and the capacity in people and resources required.

In what area did AHOVOKS and threon cooperate?

The assignments we have are both complex and diverse in themselves. Added to this are the various challenges everyone has to deal with: more data-driven, IT challenges ranging from developing new applications to managing and improving legacy. Strategically, as an agency, we have a number of objectives to guide our direction, and within a government context, we also need to be able to be quite agile with this as we are the instrument for the government and the minister to realize their objectives.
Within this context, it is not so simple to make choices and ensure that we as an organization use our resources in the best possible way. Together with threon, we started working on this: how do we ensure that we as an organization make the right choices and find the right focus in the projects we tackle? On the one hand, to strategically monitor the achievement of our goals and, on the other hand, to keep an eye on our people, who see different and especially more challenges coming their way.
Threon supported us in putting together a realizable project portfolio in which we tackle those projects that help us realize our strategy (including the minister’s goals) and better assess what capacity we need for this. Setting up a good project operation and capacity planning were essential for this.

What did the cooperation achieve?

Today we have a much more solid framework to determine which projects should be developed as a priority and we make much more conscious and substantiated choices in this regard. At the same time, today as management we are more and better informed about the impact of certain choices and the capacity in people and resources required. As a result, we also have a better overview of the various ongoing changes in the organization and can make quicker adjustments both in terms of resources and in terms of scope or expectations of certain projects.
At the level of the organization’s employees, we have taken important steps in terms of project-based working. Whereas the title of project leader used to be one that several people were pinned on without much questioning, today we handle it much more consciously. And we make sure that important projects are effectively led by people who have the necessary competences to do so, in addition to their substantive expertise.

How does threon make a difference?

Threon has worked very strongly with us rather than for us. In previous consultancy assignments, we experienced that people came to implement a particular model or method for us. There is nothing wrong with that in itself, and in many cases that is also a client’s request. But what is not so obvious afterwards is to internalize that change as an organization or to make it sustainable. And you already feel that in the course of such a process.
Thanks to the people at threon, we very quickly had the feeling that they were thinking with us in terms of what this organization needed and how an operation could be set up here that worked for us as an organization. That made it pleasant working together, of course, but also gave confidence that as an organization we evolved naturally, not that they had come to implement a method.

Why recommend threon to other organizations?

Threon’s people were attentive to the context in which they found themselves. I never felt like a client or an account of threon during our collaboration. They brought their own expertise, of course, but it was a starting point, not an end point.
We are all waiting for ready-made answers, but, sadly, they rarely exist. For the process we went through, threon was “the next best thing” for a ready-made answer: a partner who comes together from its own expertise to find which answer can fit which way.

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