Building a PMO from zero to govern 19 projects, including public-sector delivery
Nineteen projects including HMRC, MOD and Thames Water delivery, with no central visibility over any of them. We built the portfolio office from scratch, ran it, and upskilled the delivery leads who took it over.
- projects overseen
- 19
- high-profile public sector
- HMRC · MOD · Thames Water
- built and operationalised from nothing
- PMO
We stood up a centralised PMO from scratch and ran a complex portfolio while upskilling the next generation of delivery leads.
- Client
- Tecknuovo
- Duration
- 9 months
- Sector
- Consultancy and public sector, United Kingdom
- Engagement shape
- Portfolio Management Office, built from nothing and then run live.
What we walked into
Tecknuovo, a consultancy, needed a centralised Portfolio Management Office to oversee 19 diverse projects, including critical public-sector engagements, and wanted its junior staff upskilled in best practice.
The work itself
Run against The Tenhaw Way, which is published in full and free to adopt without engaging us.
We built a PMO function from the ground up, implemented portfolio frameworks for tracking and managing delivery, and provided hands-on coaching to junior team members in portfolio management and agile delivery while overseeing the live portfolio.
What came out of it
- projects overseen
- 19
- high-profile public sector
- HMRC · MOD · Thames Water
- built and operationalised from nothing
- PMO
Tecknuovo gained a fully functional PMO with real visibility and control, a markedly more capable junior delivery team, and reinforced credibility on high-profile public-sector work.
Why a buyer usually lands on this one
Written for the person arriving mid-programme with a question.
Where AI governance actually lives
Most published AI governance material describes controls. It rarely says which standing function operates them, which is why so much of it never leaves the policy document.
The NIST AI Risk Management Framework is explicit on this point: its first function is Govern, and it asks for accountability structures, defined roles and documented decision rights that exist before a system is deployed. Read as a delivery problem rather than a policy one, that is a portfolio office. Something has to hold the register of what is being built, who owns it, what it was permitted to do, and what happened when it was reviewed. In most organisations that function already exists and has simply never been asked to cover models.
Public sector delivery raises the bar
Several engagements in this portfolio touched central government and critical national infrastructure, where evidence of governance is part of the deliverable rather than an internal comfort. A portfolio office that cannot produce, on request, who approved what and on what basis is not a portfolio office.
We built the function, the frameworks and the tracking, and coached the junior delivery leads to run it. We did not implement the NIST AI Risk Management Framework here and this was not an AI portfolio. It is on this site because the control plane an agentic programme needs is this function, extended.
What this engagement does not claim
The same caveats the case studies hub carries, narrowed to this engagement so nothing here is a surprise to your analyst.
- 01
Not an AI engagement, and no AI governance claim.
This was portfolio management. Naming the NIST AI Risk Management Framework above describes what that framework asks for, not work we delivered against it.
- 02
We governed the portfolio, we did not deliver the projects.
The 19 projects were delivered by Tecknuovo's own teams and their clients. Our work was the office that made them visible, comparable and manageable.
What transfers is the function itself: a standing register of what is being built, who owns it, what it was permitted to do and what happened when it was reviewed, which is where model governance ends up living in most organisations. What does not transfer is any AI governance claim. Nothing in this portfolio was a model, and we have never run an AI or model register in production.
Programme & Delivery Management
We will govern the programme whether or not we are building any of it. £18k–£35k / month · Programme duration.
What that engagement coversOther engagements
Sector first, because that is the next question. All twelve are on the hub, grouped into the two we would call AI work and the ten we would not.
Roughly a year of stalled work, rebuilt as a working proof of concept in two weeks
12 months → 2 weeks, prior build effort rebuilt as a working proof of concept
Standing up the delivery engine behind a £40bn hydrogen business case
£40bn, business case underpinned
Landing the Discovery+ launch on a CEO-set deadline
6, development teams coordinated
Want the same thing, in your organisation?
A 30-minute call with James Rooney. We will tell you which parts of this we have done before and which we would be doing for the first time, and you will leave with a rough scope either way.
Most organisations start with a fixed-price Agent-Readiness Audit · £30k–£90k · 6–8 weeks