A PMO built to scale, in two months.
Ten years of acquisitions had left a growing project team with too many templates, too few standards and portfolio reports stitched together by hand. Digineer assessed the PMO’s maturity, then used its PMO Quick Start to stand up one consistent set of tools, a playbook and live dashboards.
At a glance
- Client
- An acquisitive industrial services company
- Program
- Enterprise PMO stand-up
- Scale
- 10,000+ employees; project managers mixing employees and consultants
- Engagement
- PMO and change management consulting, two months
- Capability
- Transformation & Value Management
The situation
Growth outpaced the project office
Over ten years the company grew in size, maturity and capability, largely by acquiring smaller companies and letting them keep their own systems and processes. When it began aligning those systems, its project managers were realigned too, and the team was stretched beyond capacity.
Where project managers were not available, workstream leaders filled the role with mixed results. Earlier attempts to set up a PMO had been too detailed in some areas and too thin in others. The company needed a PMO that was consistent, could scale to the enterprise and brought real rigor and oversight to its projects.
Warning signs
- Documentation for five project levels that nobody used
- Consultants bringing their own templates and tools
- Portfolio reporting built from manual spreadsheets
- Workstream leaders filling in as project managers
- Standards the PMO could not enforce
What we did
Assess, simplify, then build
Digineer measured the PMO against its project management maturity model through stakeholder interviews, a review of current processes and observation of projects already in flight. The goal was a core set of tools the team would actually use, delivered quickly with Digineer’s PMO Quick Start.
A maturity baseline
Interviews, process reviews and observation of in-flight projects, led by employees and by long- and short-term consultants, showed where the PMO was strong and where it needed to grow.
A core set of tools
The best of the legacy templates, merged with the Quick Start set. Spreadsheet-style tools went into the team’s work-management platform and document templates into Teams, with a sizing matrix that sets the right level of rigor for each project.
Dashboards and a playbook
Project dashboards show status, budget and health at a glance. Portfolio dashboards give the PMO director and executives every project’s status, budget and milestones, with detail on demand. A playbook ties it all together.
The outcome
Consistency leaders can see
80% more portfolio insight
The PMO director and executive leadership gained 80% more insight into the status and health of the projects in their portfolio.
Issues caught earlier
With live dashboards, leaders can spot and address issues before projects get off track, which raises confidence across the portfolio.
Faster onboarding
The playbook sets out the PMO’s purpose, roles, authority, funding and oversight, so new project managers get up to speed quickly.
One way to start a project
A sizing matrix and a quick reference for project documents give every new project the same starting point.
PMO Quick Start
Need a PMO people will actually use?
Digineer’s PMO Quick Start sets up a consistent, scalable project office in weeks, built around the tools your teams already have.
Client name withheld for confidentiality.