Insurance
From Fragmented PMO to Connected Portfolio
Primary Area
Agile Delivery, OPM
Service Area
Strategic Demand Management, Agile Integration, Project Management
Products Used
Project Online, Power Platform, Azure DevOps, SharePoint
Roles Impacted
Program Manager, Project Managers, Developers
Impact Highlight
50% reduced project initiation time
Opportunity
A Global Insurance Company’s Project Management Organization (PMO) struggled to coordinate work because project plans, agile backlogs, and demand intake lived in disconnected tools with no reliable integration to Azure DevOps; the result was duplicate entry, inconsistent status reporting, and delayed project starts. Leadership treated the fragmentation as an opportunity to standardize delivery, automate demand management, and gain trustworthy portfolio-level insight across agile and waterfall work.
No automated demand intake: requests arrived via email, spreadsheets, and regional ticketing systems, leading to lost/late initiatives.
Project schedules in Project Server, agile delivery in isolated Azure DevOps orgs, with no synchronized scope, effort, or status.
Manual re-keying between tools consumed PMO analyst time and introduced data errors that rippled into regulatory and financial reporting.
Inconsistent project metadata (naming, cost categories, risk fields) blocked roll-up views and trend analysis.
Resource capacity planning was spreadsheet-driven and out of date within days, impacting regulatory commitments and market launches.
Solution
We partnered with PMO, IT, and business sponsors to align roles, accountability, and governance so demand-to-delivery flowed through a common model supported by change management and targeted skills uplift. The team designed and implemented an integrated Microsoft portfolio architecture that unifies demand capture, project planning, agile execution, and reporting.
People: Role-mapped RACI for demand intake, product ownership, and PMO governance; delivered training paths for PMs, Scrum Masters, and executives; established a center-of-excellence playbook.
Process: Standard demand-to-approval workflow with configurable scoring (value, risk, regulatory impact); stage gates aligned to agile Program Increments; data quality rules enforced at each gate; automated escalations for stalled requests.
Technology – Microsoft-first:
Power Apps front-end (Dataverse) for structured demand capture with mandatory business case fields.
Power Automate flows to create/sync Project Online projects and Azure DevOps epics/features from approved demand items; bi-directional status and effort roll-ups via REST/Graph APIs.
Unified area/iteration taxonomy mapped to portfolio hierarchy.
Project Online configured with enterprise custom fields tied to Dataverse demand IDs for traceability.
Semantic model exposed in Power BI for portfolio, compliance, and financial dashboards.
Microsoft Teams integration for approval notifications, adaptive cards for gate decisions; SharePoint Online document control for required artifacts.
Security & compliance enforced via Microsoft Entra ID conditional access.
Impact
Integrated Azure DevOps with Project Online through the Power Platform modernized portfolio management and linked agile development directly to structured demand intake, eliminating double entry and speeding project initiation by half. With trustworthy, real-time data, the PMO now prioritizes funding decisions faster, meets regulatory evidence requests with far less effort, and transparently manages both agile and waterfall delivery.
Eliminated ~15,000 manual data re-entry actions annually between PMO and delivery tools.
Project initiation cycle time reduced 50% after automated demand-to-project creation.
Demand approval throughput improved by enforcing scoring and automated routing.
Cross-system status/data discrepancies reduced significantly, improving executive confidence in portfolio reports.
Portfolio cost variance at stage-gate reviews reduced through earlier visibility of scope and resource needs.
Resource forecast accuracy improved.
Regulatory/audit evidence preparation effort reduced due to traceable demand-to-delivery lineage and centralized artifacts.
Strong active user adoption within 3 months across PMO designated roles.
Standardized taxonomy enabled enterprise reporting across active and pipeline initiatives in Power BI.
Freed PMO analyst capacity previously spent on data wrangling, redirected to portfolio value analysis.