Over the past few years, CBO has grown from a 10-person team to 27 professionals across two jurisdictions, expanding our service offering and client base. With growth comes the need for scalability, especially in our quality management systems. Ensuring consistent excellence in delivery is part of our ethos, and it’s essential to the trust our clients place in us.

Our needs

As we scale our services and team, we face a critical challenge: how to evolve our quality management approach to maintain high standards across an increasingly diverse and complex portfolio.

We’ve always embedded active Quality Assurance (QA) at the heart of our engagements and service delivery, ensuring every client interaction meets our high standards. But to allow us to grow, we knew we must go beyond QA. We needed a system that supported:

• A consistent, end-to-end client engagement lifecycle
• Clear, repeatable processes for engagement kick-off, delivery and closure
• Cross-functional collaboration
• Adaptability for new markets, services, and clients
• A light-touch, efficient quality management approach aligned with our culture

We needed guidance from those who had been through this journey before.

APM connections

As a corporate partner of the Association for Project Management (APM), we were looking to connect with organisations who could share practical insight on quality system evolution. APM introduced us to Apache iX, another APM corporate partner known for their mature and ISO9001-accredited Quality Management System (QMS).

This introduction exemplifies APM’s value in facilitating meaningful peer-to-peer learning among like-minded organisations.

Introduction to Apache iX

Apache iX is a Bristol-based technical consultancy supporting government and industry clients in national defence and security. Their services span strategy, P3M, business analysis and systems engineering—mirroring many of our own, albeit in a different sector.

Despite operating in different industries, we discovered aligned services, a focus on delivery quality and a drive for continuous improvement. Their ISO9001 journey and supporting quality systems were particularly impressive.

Working together

From the outset, Apache iX were open, engaging, and generous with their knowledge. They shared details of their quality management journey, including the challenges they faced, the tools they developed and the internal discussions that shaped their QMS.

The discussion covered a wide range of areas:

• How to embed culture, values and relationships into quality systems
• Whether to build from the ground up or apply a quality framework to existing processes
• The real-world impact of ISO accreditation on client relationships
• Their use of a Project App and dashboards to review delivery, monitor data and integrate CRM
• Their continuous improvement model

CBO’s outcomes

Our discussions with Apache iX didn’t just answer our questions, they reframed them. We now have a clearer view of what a future-state quality management approach at CBO could look like. We’ve gained:

• Confidence in the need to scale our QMS in step with business growth
• Inspiration from Apache’s practical and cultural approach
• Clarity on which tools and approaches might work in our own context
• A better understanding of what ISO9001 entails

Importantly, it reaffirmed that our current QA practices are strong and that our aspiration to evolve them is timely and necessary.

The benefit to both parties

For CBO, the benefit was direct: a strategic sounding board from an organisation ahead of us on the journey. For Apache iX, the value was sharing their experiences and connecting with a like-minded consultancy outside their sector.

More broadly, it reaffirmed the role of the APM community as a catalyst for collaboration. This wasn’t just a knowledge share, it was a strategic conversation between two consultancies whose values align and who care deeply about getting quality right.

Call to action

To other corporate partners in the APM network, we encourage you to share your stories, lessons and frameworks with others.

Whether you’re just starting your quality journey or refining a team capability, there’s so much value in reaching across sectors and sharing experiences. Collaboration isn’t just for project delivery, it’s how we, as professionals, keep raising the bar for our industry.