Tecknuovo: Building a PMO from zero to govern 19 projects, including public-sector delivery
The challenge
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.
What we did
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.
// run against The Tenhaw Way, published in full and free to adopt without engaging us
The outcome
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.
Limits, and what is withheld
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.
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.
Other 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 on the launch, one of them the visual rebrand team James ran
See how we did it
A real engagement walked through by the person who led it, then the same method applied to yours.
- The ways of working, published in full and free to adopt without hiring us.
- The target operating model James co-led at HSBC: designed and piloted for 500 teams, with global rollout due in 2026 and not yet rolled out.
- The AI build inside a live London specialty insurer: a working proof of concept, month by month, with the client anonymised to a market.
Everything the call covers about our work is already published on this site. What it adds is the person who did that work, and your own situation put through the same method.
The 30-minute discovery call starts with your problem. This one starts with our work.
Pick a time on cal.comWant 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 start with a fixed-price AI Readiness Audit · £30k–£90k · 6–8 weeks
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