PMPartners/ITPM Customer Pre-press Announcement
Closing the gap between strategy and results

Sydney, Australia. 3rd December 2007

PMPartners and ITPM merge to provide full service, expert project management to Australia's Top 100 organisations.

Major organisations invest millions in strategy development and rely on change initiatives to drive value and results. Major delays and even complete failures from poorly executed projects all too often prevent them from achieving their desired results. These organisations clearly understand that they cannot stay in business if they cannot manage their projects. In fact, a recent survey showed that 76% of C level executives across the globe attribute successful change initiatives to effective project management. Clearly there is a fast growing need to deliver well executed projects.

Imagine an Australian company being the market leader in project management capability development combined with an outstanding project delivery track record. Currently the Australian project management industry can offer one or the other. It has never been more crucial than now to be able to deliver focused and well executed projects to achieve organizational objectives.

To address this need, the directors of PMPartners and ITPM today announce that they have signed a heads of agreement for an exciting merger of the companies that enables excellence in both capability development and project delivery. The merger creates Australia's first "one stop project management shop" which is the country's leading project management focused company.

PMPartners is a Sydney based company founded by Peter Swan and Steve Hewitson specialising in project and program management capability development. ITPM is a Sydney headquartered company co-founded by Nik Samuelson that is a professional services company specialising in project and program management, predominantly in the information technology market. The companies have a combined customer list that contains Australia's most prestigious corporate and government organizations.

Pete Swan, co-founder and director of PMPartners said "The offerings of both companies are entirely complimentary, with negligible overlap and targeted at the same market segments. Having worked with ITPM over the past 4 or so years, we commenced discussions and decided that together we can provide an enhanced range of project management oriented services that will offer industry leading project services to our customers".

"For some time, I have been aware of PMPartners and their industry leading project management skills development capability" stated Nik Samuelson. "When I looked at growing the ITPM business, I believed that the union of the two equal sized companies would create a formidable force in the Australian project management professional services market".

When asked about the impact on each of the companies, PMPartners co-founder Steve Hewitson said "This is a relatively rare instance where the combination of two companies provides significant advantages to the staff and the customers without any overlap of positions. The new entity provides opportunities for people to grow with the organization and pursue career paths in the larger entity. A real consideration we had about the merger was the impact on our respective people and how we would add enhanced value to our customers."

"Successful results require precise, well managed project execution. Additionally the risk of project failure is increasing as today's rapid pace constrains already stretched resources. The new merged entity will be ideally positioned to assist organizations achieve required results by developing their capabilities or by providing delivery capability on a temporary basis" added Nik Samuelson.

The merged entity will trade as PMPartners Group and remain privately held.