01Independent PMO advisory
We set the guide rails, and we make the reporting run itself
Governance and automation for enterprise portfolios, in whatever tooling you already own. We take no reseller margin and hold no vendor partnership, so there is nothing attached to the advice.
- Portfolio value managed
- £100M+
- Annual savings delivered
- 5–15%
- Years in PMO leadership
- 15+
02The problem
We have sat on your side of the table
Half of UK PMOs are less than four years old, and the three things they most consistently cannot do are prioritise the portfolio, see capacity, and prove that benefits landed. Four problems follow from that. None of them is really a tooling problem.
- of projects complete on time
- 36%
- complete on budget
- 52%
- deliver their full benefits
- 42%
- 01
Reporting absorbs the effort the decisions deserve
The pack takes three weeks to assemble and is contested in the room. By the time the portfolio view is agreed, the position it described has moved.
- 02
Capacity is an opinion, not a number
Resource positions live across spreadsheets with different formats and update cycles. Asked what the portfolio can absorb next quarter, nobody can answer without a fortnight of work.
- 03
Scenarios are unaffordable
Changing one assumption means rebuilding the model. So the board sees one plan and a sensitivity, rather than the three options it actually needs to choose between.
- 04
The tool was never the problem
Enterprise PPM platforms get bought, configured and half-adopted. The delivery teams return to spreadsheets, and the investment shows up as licence cost rather than better decisions.
03Before you talk to anyone
Find out which of those four you actually have
The Scorecard is twenty questions about how your PMO runs day to day, across prioritisation, capacity, benefits and reporting. You get your score at the end, free, and the section-by-section report by email if you want it. No call, no pitch, and nothing to unsubscribe from.
20 questions · four sections · about five minutes
04Advisory
Two halves of the same job
Governance on its own is bureaucracy, and automation on its own is an IT project. The value is in running them together. Each engagement is scoped to a decision you need to make better, not a framework you need to adopt.
Guide rails
What gets funded, who is free to do it, and whether the benefit arrived. Decided once, applied consistently, and defensible to an auditor.
- 01
Value-focused PMO setup
Design and deploy a portfolio management office that measures business value delivered, rather than tasks completed.
- 02
Value delivery framework
Establish a continuous value delivery framework that keeps portfolio investment aligned to strategic outcomes.
- 03
Stakeholder coaching
Move PMO leaders and project managers from output tracking to outcome realisation across the portfolio.
Reporting that runs itself
The same rigour, without the fortnight of collation. Built into the tooling you already own, because we have nothing to sell you instead of it.
- 04
AI and automation strategy
Introduce automation and applied AI into PMO practice for predictive insight and materially lower administrative overhead.
- 05
Data analytics enablement
Turn project data into decision support: analytics that answer the questions the investment committee actually asks.
- 06
Technology advancement
Evolve existing PPM tooling towards scenario planning, value scoring and portfolio optimisation, without a rip-and-replace programme.
05Fit
Who this is for, and who it is not
We are two people with no licence to sell you anything. That makes us the right call for some problems and the wrong one for others, and it is cheaper for both of us to work out which before the first conversation.
Worth a conversation
- You have a PMO already, most likely stood up in the last few years, and it is not yet trusted with the decisions it was built to inform.
- You own a PPM platform you have half-adopted, and the question is what to automate inside it rather than what to buy next.
- You are carrying a portfolio through a deadline someone else set: a regulatory date, an end-of-life, a merger.
Not us
- You need people in seats. We do not supply resource, and the firms that do are better at it than we would be.
- You want a tool recommendation with an implementation partner attached. We take no reseller margin and hold no vendor partnership, which means we cannot be hired to justify a decision already made.
- You want us to run the delivery. We set the guide rails; we do not drive between them.
- You need a name the board already recognises, or a firm that is on a preferred-supplier list. We are two people. There are rooms where that counts for more than the work does, and we would rather say so now than at the end of a procurement.
Not sure which column you are in? Twenty questions will tell you.
06The founder
Jo Dourou Schrader
Founder and Principal Consultant
A PMO strategist with over fifteen years transforming portfolio management functions inside enterprise organisations. Jo specialises in designing target operating models, leading delivery governance and compliance, and digitalising and automating PMO process at scale.
That work has delivered measurable cost savings and operational improvement across retail, financial services, media, technology and logistics.
- 01
100+ mentored
Project management professionals coached and developed globally
- 02
M&A governance
Led governance for major acquisitions and ownership transfers
- 03
Automation at scale
Digitalised and automated PMO process across multiple organisations
- 04
Award-winning
Recognised internationally for PMO leadership, and a judge of others
07In their words
People who have run portfolios alongside her
“Jo's vibrant personality and focus on the big picture were the first traits that made our partnership effortless. Her projects were driven by timelines, eye for detail, resilience and high levels of empathy.”
“Jo has that perfect combination of vast experience, in-depth technical knowledge and superb people skills. With such a deep knowledge and practical application of project management methodologies, her attention to detail has been unparalleled in my experience.”
“Jo's ability to juggle multiple projects was unlike any I've seen before, and it made a dramatic difference to the productivity of the PMO team she led.”
Whether you are standing a PMO up or straightening one out
The first conversation is thirty minutes and costs nothing. If we are not the right people for the problem, we will say so.