Case study / Delivery record

Building a PMO from zero at an ANZ digital agency

As Head of Delivery and PMO, I built the operating system for an ANZ digital agency from zero. Shared playbooks, release gates and executive reporting cut time-to-market by 15% without adding bureaucracy.

  • Head of Delivery ownership
  • practice-wide playbooks
  • release-readiness gates
  • monthly and quarterly business reviews
  • −15% agency time-to-market

01

Context

The agency had enterprise clients but no delivery function.

An early-stage agency with enterprise retail and consumer clients across Australia and New Zealand and no delivery function.

02

Challenge

Predictability had to arrive without bureaucracy.

Install predictability without bureaucracy, in a team that had never had a PMO and did not want one.

03

What I did

A small set of repeatable habits created one view of delivery health.

Wrote the playbooks, set the cadences, introduced release-readiness gates and DoR/DoD, built Jira and Confluence dashboards, standardised QBR/MBR reporting to founders and clients, scaled the team.

04

Outcome

The operating system cut agency time-to-market by 15%.

−15% time-to-market; one view of delivery health, risk and margin for founders and client executives.

05

What it taught me

A PMO is installed by example, not mandate.

A PMO is a set of habits, and habits are installed by example, not by mandate.

Programme timeline
  1. 01

    Delivery audit

  2. 02

    Playbooks

  3. 03

    Release gates

  4. 04

    QBR/MBR

  5. 05

    Scaled operation

← All work