Project Support Processes and Infrastructure

NHI excels in all aspects of program and project management, including planning, execution, and quality assurance/quality control. NHI uses a leading-edge information technology infrastructure to support its energy management consulting assignments.

Core Project Support Processes

Project Planning and Management Process

NHI employs a formal project planning process that involves developing detailed project plans, tracking actuals against plan, and using sophisticated estimation techniques.

• Planning: For each project, we develop formal project plans that detail tasks, milestones, resource assignments, and dependencies. An overall, high-level plan and a detailed plan for the project inception phase are developed at the beginning of the project. During each project phase, detailed project plans are developed and refined for subsequent phases.
  
  
• Tracking: We formally track progress against the plan on a weekly basis to identify problem areas that require intervention.
  
  
• Estimating: NHI employs parameter-driven estimating tools. These tools are continuously refined based on project heuristics. After each project, we enhance the accuracy of our estimating tools by updating them to reflect what we learned from our “estimate versus actual” analysis performed during post-completion project reviews.

NHI uses specific methodologies and tools to manage project scope, identify issues, and mitigate risk.

• Scope Management: NHI practices rigorous and formal scope management.  Project scope is clearly defined during the project inception phase. Any requested changes to scope are documented, challenged, measured to determine impact, and subjected to a formal approval process.
  
  
• Issue Management: For each project, we maintain an issues-tracking database that is used throughout the life of the project to formally document project-related issues, prioritize issues, track progress against issues, and record issue resolution.
  
  
• Risk Management: The identification of project risks begins during the project inception phase. All known risks are identified, documented, assessed, and ranked according to a combination of likelihood and degree of impact. Each risk is analyzed to determine how that risk might either be avoided or controlled. Risk mitigation strategies are documented. Risk reviews are performed periodically throughout the life of each project to ensure that known risks are actively controlled and that all new risks are identified and managed.

Quality Assurance/Quality Control Process

Quality management is an integral part of NHI’s consulting project delivery process. We take the time, at project inception, to work with our clients to define what quality means to them. We elicit quality requirements along many dimensions and make them explicit and measurable. We then develop a project quality plan designed to meet our clients' quality objectives. Throughout the life of each project, we measure our performance against the quality plan to ensure that we are taking all necessary steps to meet the stated objectives.

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Project Delivery Infrastructure

NHI is committed to creating and maintaining a leading-edge information technology infrastructure to support our energy management consulting assignments. At NHI, we strive to enhance the productivity and efficiency of our own project teams by using some of the most sophisticated knowledge management, collaboration, and communication processes, practices, and technologies available.

NHI's knowledge management and collaboration infrastructure includes four categories of tools:

• Team facilitation tools
• Document management repositories
• Communication and collaboration tools
• Reference materials and educational resources.