In light of the increasing enterprise demand for the services, our transportation client had siloed functional structure, that due to legacy considerations – was focused heavily on operations. Such a structure could not support the demand and changes that were taking place at the rest of the client’s company.

In addition to the lack of a scalable organizational structure that would be supportive of the change, there were significant issues in many areas of program and project delivery. There was also a lack of alignment to corporate strategic objectives, insufficient transparency, inability to quickly scale to meet the enterprise demands, as well as budget management issues. As a result, nearly two-thirds of the initiatives within the portfolio were over budget and were late. Besides, there were a few of the systemic delivery issues that impacted the ability of my client to deliver initiatives.

After analyzing the current state, we defined the interim and target states and outlined specific maturity targets for each. We then assessed organizational ability to accommodate the change without any material impacts on the existing operations. All of the activities were defined and sequenced as part of the transformational portfolio. Quick wins and items that were critical to the business operations were ranked higher and included earlier into the transformational roadmap. All of the changes were first piloted by several programs and projects within the portfolio of our client before the rollout across the portfolio that was also rationalized and established. In addition to establishing the portfolio and implementing all of the portfolio management processes, we defined PMO and its mandate, and critical aspects of the PMO governance, including gating and delivery governance (at portfolio, program and project levels). All of the changes were supplemented with a very effective organizational change management strategy to ease the transition of practitioners, clients, and sponsors into the change. As a result, the interim level of PMO maturity was fully achieved, and the organization was well on its way towards the target state of maturity of governance processes.