Avalanche Consulting | Finance and Economics

Our team help clients develop strong compelling and viable investment cases, establishing financial feasibility amid opportunities and constraints. We help clients determine capital structure and project financial architecture through financial modelling, which helps clients consider investment through equity, debt, recourse and guarantees. This is conducted for a plethora of projects including public private partnerships.

Our teams are independent and pragmatic financial experts, infrastructure economists and managers, including asset and performance managers. They bring decades of professional expertise which strengthens outcomes for our clients.

Working under rules, guidelines and regulations of many stakeholders such as World Bank, the European Union, Millennium Challenge Corporation and the African Development Bank to name but a few, we deliver strategic procurement solutions to our clients for major works in megaprojects, consulting as well as procurement of goods. Not only do we provide procurement advisory, but we also work as procurement agents on megaprojects, with a concentrated focus on developing the procurement strategy, guidelines and policies, as well as implementation strategies, including templates and forms that help clients develop a full audit trail for transparency and accountability. We also run the procurement process from advertising, bidder correspondence management, bid receipt and evaluation, reporting and contract award. Our professional teams also conduct contract administration until close out.

We provide procurement analysis that helps clients to determine how best to approach procurement in their projects and programmes, secure competitive bidding and financing, and manage procurements all the way to contract closeout. Our independent procurement advisory also entails commercial structuring and risk transfer that yield value for money and affordability.

In many projects, clients may put full emphasis on project execution and at times ignore required consideration at both the front-end as well as the back-end of project management. During the initial period of project due diligence and selection, we are on the ground helping clients to go beyond achieving the project ‘on time, in budget and to scope’ and ask some key questions, the answers of which help clients to make decisions on which projects to implement. Such questions include but are not limited to:

• Who establishes the knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities and who manages them?
• Who manages the interactions and the trade-offs that lie between the ‘ideal’ requirements and the fully worked-up project proposals?
• Who defines the budget, who determines the schedule targets?
• Who develops the project strategy and who manages the preparation of project documentation needed for execution approval?
• How is innovation in and around the project considered and managed? How is value enhanced as the proposition is developed? etc.
• The big question is, what really is, and should be, the role of project management in the early formative ‘front-end’ stages of a project?

During execution of projects, we provide the best teams that work with clients to support them throughout the project life-cycle from the development of the business case, procurement management, undertaking design management, construction management to contract administration. At back-end of programme and project management is the idea of ‘smooth-landing’. During project execution, many a time clients and contractors focus on the construction and hand-over. Many a time, issues of trials, testing and operation are not central to the execution strategy. This renders construction incomplete during handover. We take lead of back-end project management, which entails ensuring that systems and technologies are fully operational prior handover, the signage is clear to all and can be easily identified and understood, operation manuals are in place for use during infrastructure performance and that users are fully trained on how operate the infrastructure.

Key considerations to asset management include the reflection of the nature and purpose of the client, its operating context, its financial constraints and regulatory requirements and the needs and expectations of the organisation and its stakeholders.

With these in mind, we help clients realize value through the management of risk and opportunity, and we help them strike a balance of risk, cost and performance, working within regulatory and legislative environment of our clients. This helps improve our clients’ financial performance, make informed asset investment decisions, manage risk, improve services and outputs and comply with legal and statutory requirements.

Our teams conduct full project analysis to determine both financial and economic viability of projects. This helps clients – both in the private and public sector – to determine project affordability and make successful investment decisions. Private sector clients have their focus on financial returns while public sector clients are adamant about value for money. To this end, we conduct full due diligence including financial modelling and cost benefit analysis, as well as full risk analysis while we help clients identify revenue streams in the process. This eases sound decision-making in the built environment, helping projects remain on top of commercial, technical as well as operational issues.
We challenge clients to interrogate the following questions:
Do projects tie with public policy targets?
Do they deliver intended financial and economic outcomes?
Do projects assure financial and commercial feasibility?
Can the client afford the project in the long run?
Will the project be affected by changes in public policy and markets movements?
What is the procurement and commercial model to deliver a project?

Project Finance Procurement and Contracting Programme and Project Management Assets operations and management