Fractional PMO for a Professional Services Firm: From Chaos to Predictable Delivery
Eighteen concurrent client engagements, no portfolio visibility, and a managing partner spending 15 hours a week chasing status.
The Challenge
A 55-person management consulting firm was managing 18 concurrent client engagements. Each engagement had a dedicated engagement manager but no shared portfolio infrastructure. The managing partner was spending an estimated 15 hours per week manually collecting status from engagement managers, producing a partner-level view for the monthly leadership meeting, and troubleshooting engagement health issues that should have been surfaced two weeks earlier. Delivery quality varied significantly by engagement manager.
The Approach
Documented all 18 active engagements against a common framework: scope, schedule, client satisfaction indicators, risk level, and resource allocation. Designed a lightweight delivery standard applicable to all engagement types: kickoff documentation, mid-engagement check-in, and closeout review.
Built the portfolio dashboard and established a bi-weekly engagement health review cadence. Engagement managers trained on the reporting standard. The managing partner's 15-hour-per-week status collection reduced to a 2-hour portfolio review meeting.
Retained at the Essential tier for ongoing portfolio oversight, new engagement intake review, and quarterly PMO maturity improvement sessions. After 6 months: delivery standards adopted across all engagement types, client escalation frequency reduced significantly.
Results
"I was spending 15 hours a week doing what a good PMO should do automatically. PMOstart built that system. I got those hours back and the firm started delivering better."
The service behind this result
Fractional PMO
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