Establishing A Scalable Project Management Office For A Professional Services Firm

Building a Structured Project Management Office (PMO)

A global leader in human capital management services provides comprehensive customer support for payroll processing, HR and benefit administration, recruiting, analytics, and technology consulting. After a sustained period of exponential growth, this firm identified opportunities to improve their customer onboarding experience and scale their project delivery model by creating a Project Management Office (PMO). The PMO’s goal was to act as a centralized intake function that bridged the gap between Sales and Managed Services, ensuring smooth end-user customer onboarding and service execution.

In addition to creating the new PMO, this client needed project management support for the annual open enrollment of more than twenty customer businesses with different plans and payroll schedules. Our client’s payroll and benefit departments had a tight timeline and many new employees who had not gone through open enrollment with this team before. As the calendar year expired, thousands of employees counted on this firm for the continuation of their critical benefits.

With core values like responsiveness, accountability, and excellence in service, our client recognized their need for dedicated project leadership. They turned to Mavendog to provide independent project and program leaders with the skills and experience needed to help them navigate this period of organizational growth and resource constraints.

Enhanced Operational Efficiency

The new, Mavendog-tailored PMO became the go-to intake function for all of the firm’s new customers and their add-on services. The structured intake approach reduced onboarding inefficiencies, created a unified view of each customer business’s data, and improved cross-functional collaboration. Project visibility was significantly improved by ensuring all teams had access to the current customer project’s status, which enhanced decision-making and internal resource allocation.

Improved Client Experience

Under the new process, end-user customers no longer had to answer the same questions or provide the same documentation multiple times, significantly reducing frustration and data integrity risks. The PMO streamlined the firm’s overall intake, ensuring that delivery teams had the necessary information for high-value, personalized customer support. This outcome was our client’s top priority, as part of their commitment to providing value in every interaction, whether with customers or colleagues.

Change Management Success

Mavendog’s early engagement with stakeholders helped them build trust quickly, leading to faster adoption of new processes. Internal teams, initially skeptical, embraced the structured intake approach after seeing its efficiency. A PMO implementation can often be seen as an unwelcome layer of bureaucracy, but the Mavendog team coached stakeholders on the “why” behind the “what” of process change. Teams eventually embraced their roles in the broader PMO strategy. Also, senior leaders supported and communicated the changes, keeping focus on the ultimate goal of improving customers’ service delivery experience.

Customized Tool Implementation

Because Mavendog is “software agnostic” (i.e., does not represent any specific software tool or product), our team was able to implement the minimum viable technology for the project’s needs. Our client had identified Smartsheet as their preferred technology for intake and tracking. The Mavendog team swiftly established a Minimal Viable Product toolkit to address the project’s immediate requirements. The Benefits team also adopted SmartSheet dashboards to improve transparency and reporting for open enrollment.

PMO Framework Proof of Concept (PoC) for Future Scalability

Mavendog built the PMO framework as an evergreen model, allowing the firm to iterate and refine it as they grow. With an underlying philosophy of Capability Maturity Modeling, Mavendog helped chart a scalable path towards repeatable, defined, managed, and optimized processes for the future. Our client recognized the substantial value provided, including enhanced support for project management recruiting and onboarding, as well as further process improvements and optimizations to the PMO and their customer intake processes.

After successful delivery of the original scope of work, the client extended Mavendog’s contract, investing in additional scope and steps along this maturity path.

Open Enrollment Exceeded Expectations

Mavendog’s involvement identified and reduced variation in the open enrollment process, serving as a neutral third party between the client’s internal departments. The payroll and benefit teams adopted Mavendog’s SmartSheet model from the PMO project and are continuing to refine dashboards and processes for next year. 95% of our client’s end-user customers met their open enrollment date with the new process, and 100% were complete within one month of the original deadline.