Revitalising PMO for a health and wellbeing organisation

Having the right governance and controls, supported by an effective PMO is critical to successful transformation delivery and an efficient change portfolio.  

Our customer needed to accelerate and re-vitalise their PMO following organisation upheaval to bring the right capabilities, governance and control to both a major transformation programme and the ongoing portfolio of change.  

Project One was able to bring PMO expertise to identify strengths, weaknesses and opportunities in our customer’s change delivery controls. We were able to then deliver new best practice PMO capabilities supported by tools, templates and guidance to create a tailored, effective governance and control framework.

With a Delivery Management Team which had been through a period of re-structuring and upheaval, our customer had the opportunity to re-vitalise Governance and PMO capabilities for their Technology function. 

Our customer needed to rebuild their central PMO capabilities to both support a major transformation programme, and to deliver ongoing governance and control for the future portfolio of change and transformation. Having some existing capabilities, tools, templates and ways of working in place but often ineffective or ignored, a step change in governance and control was required to support the business as it undertook this significant transformation. 

As the major transformation programme was already mobilising, our customer needed rapid support to enhance and accelerate their PMO functions capability so that the PMO could:  

• Effectively support and govern the programme  
• Call upon best practice governance and control methodologies to maximise value being added by PMO 
• Exploit existing capabilities and plug gaps in controls to enable a delivery governance and management. 

Accelerating capability and delivering at pace were key for our customer. We knew we could bring our proven controls to enhance the few processes which were already in place, but we initially needed to understand where the strengths, weaknesses and opportunities lay to create the greatest impact in the shortest time. To do this, within our first week, our PMO expert was able to: 

• Review the maturity of all existing delivery management and PMO practices, tools, templates and their adoption across the portfolio. We could quickly identify best practices which could be built upon and enhanced, and spot gaps which would drive immediate benefits in governance and control to enable effective change delivery. 
• Develop a backlog of capability and control improvements for the PMO. Drawing upon the identified strengths and weaknesses a prioritised backlog allowed us to focus our time with the customer onto controls which would transform their capabilities. We were able to prioritise the backlog to focus onto small, quick wins to deliver immediate improvement to the PMO, must-have controls needed for the mobilising transformation programme and ongoing capabilities which would support the change portfolio into the future. 

We know that different PMO controls and capabilities vary in time to create, implement and embed. Some are more complex than others, and some are limited by wider governance cycles (e.g. monthly reporting or financial cycle). Having agreed the prioritised backlog with our customer’s portfolio manager, we were able to iterate through the control areas such as Dependency Management, Risk, Planning etc.  

Creating Capability 

For each Governance and Control area our PMO specialist was able to: 

• Resolve gaps in controls for priority backlog items including defining the standards and expectations of delivery teams in an easy to access, search and maintain SharePoint knowledge base 
• Document the ‘rules of the game’ for both PMs and PMO support which teams can expect where needed, preparing the team to drive up standards and compliance with governance and controls 
• Develop simple, easy to use tools and templates to assist PMs adopt the new standards and provide clear, automated management information to support change leaders. 

As soon as each new capability area was created our experienced PMO released them to the delivery team, getting to value as quickly as possible. We supported the customer’s PMO and PMs in adopting the new tools and made sure they had all the documentation, guidance and support they needed to maintain the new controls. By implementing and proving individual capabilities, we were able to test and refine each area using real delivery projects as the proving ground. By having PMO expertise we knew how to make all the control areas gel together to build a consistent, tailored and easy to use governance framework. 

Over a seven-week period we were able to accelerate and enhance PMO, governance and control capabilities for our customer. We embedded the new ways of working and transitioned the ongoing PMO improvements to the customer’s team. 

By quickly reviewing our customer’s existing capabilities, identifying priority areas of improvement and delivering on those needs, we were able to support both the mobilising major transformation programme and the future portfolio of change.  

Project One Value Add 

• Customer needed to quickly re-vitalise PMO, governance and controls ahead of a major transformation programme 
• We were able to quickly understand their existing capabilities and identify a prioritised backlog of improvements 
• Within seven weeks we delivered new capabilities, tools and processes for the ongoing governance of the change portfolio.

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theteam@projectone.com