Fixed scope
Decision forums that people actually use.
Decision forums, cadence and reporting for the digital and transformation portfolio — designed with the people who will use them.
- 4–8 weeks · design + first cycle
- Forums · cadence · reporting
What prompts the call
- Projects are approved in different rooms on different evidence, two of them are building the same capability, and nobody can say what the portfolio costs this year without a week of collation.
- Governance exists, is heavy, and is quietly bypassed — a steering group that rubber-stamps, a monthly report nobody reads, a stage gate that has never once stopped anything.
- A new portfolio owner has arrived and inherited forums whose logic nobody can reconstruct.
- An audit finding has to be answered, and the honest answer requires changing how decisions are made rather than documenting how they were.
How it runs
PMO structures where they help. Design with the people who will sit in the forums, then run through a first cycle before stepping out.
Week 1–2
Diagnostic
Which forums exist, who really decides, what evidence decisions rest on, and where the time goes between a request and an answer. The gap between the published process and the real one is the starting point, and it is always there.
Week 2–5
Design, with the people who will use it
Not delivered to them. Governance designed in isolation is complied with at best; governance designed by its participants is used. This is the single largest determinant of whether any of it survives my leaving.
Week 2–5
Decision rights and cadence
Who approves what, at which threshold, on what evidence, and how often. PMO structures where they help and not where they do not — a PMO is not automatically the answer to a governance problem, and selling one as such is how PMOs lose credibility in the first place.
Week 5–8
A first cycle, run
The part most governance work skips. Sitting in the forums as they actually meet, watching where the design binds, correcting it before it hardens. A framework handed over on slides has not been tested.
What you get
On the table.
- A governance model: forums, membership, decision rights and thresholds.
- A cadence that fits the organisation’s existing rhythm instead of competing with it.
- Reporting that feeds each forum the evidence it needs, and nothing beyond it.
- PMO structure and role definitions, where a PMO is warranted.
- One full cycle run with me in the room, and the corrections that came out of it.
- A short handover note to the portfolio owner on what to watch for.
What I need from you.
- The people who will sit in the forums, in the design sessions. This does not work as a document review.
- A portfolio owner willing to settle decision rights, which is a political question before it is a design one.
- Visibility of the real portfolio, including the projects that are not formally in it.
- A first cycle to run inside the engagement window, rather than starting after I leave.
When this is the wrong call
- You want a framework document. Good ones are already published; I would be charging you to retype one.
- Decision rights are contested and nobody will settle them. Design cannot substitute for that conversation.
- The portfolio is three projects. The overhead will exceed the benefit.
- What is actually needed is programme recovery rather than governance design.
Questions
- Do we really need a PMO?
- Often not. If leadership cannot get a clear picture of status, priorities and resourcing across more than about ten concurrent projects, then some standing function helps — but it can be light. The question I start from is whether a PMO is the answer, not how large it should be.
- How do you stop it becoming bureaucratic?
- Every process has to pass one test: does this help projects succeed? If it only helps somebody receive a report, it does not go in. That test is handed over with the model so it keeps being applied after I leave.
- Can you work with our existing project managers?
- They are the people I design it with. The best portfolio governance is built by the people who will run it — the aim is to make them more effective, not to install a layer above them.
- Does this work in the public sector?
- Yes, and the constraints are designed around rather than wished away — stage gates, procurement rules and tender obligations are fixed points. Much of my delivery background is public-sector IT.