Background
RW King partnered with a large municipal utility provider serving nearly 2 million residents across two counties. The organization was completing a large, complex, and high-profile system implementation that had stressed its Project Management and Change Management capabilities. While a Project Management Office (PMO) was in place, the organization faced significant challenges with leadership visibility, control, and confidence in IT delivery.
At a Glance
What Mattered
Align IT’s 3-year roadmap with enterprise strategy while optimizing resource engagement and delivery
What We Noticed
Without clear portfolio alignment, business units bypassed governance, requesting tech support directly. This fragmented resource planning, deprioritized operational commitments, and diluted strategic impact—highlighting the need for integrated intake and prioritization.
What Changed
workshops held
with Senior Team
Unified Portfolio
Lifecycle adopted
for IT delivery
overallocation
within 90-days
resource loading
by role & unit
Challenge
After a successful IT PMO transformation, the IT organization decided to uplevel its prioritization and resource management challenges. Many projects were missing milestones due to last-minute resource contention and overallocation. Start and stop requests were impacting teams’ ability to ensure operations and support duties and gave the indication of ineffective planning. IT managers (and Senior Leadership) lacked visibility in upcoming resource needs, or where, when, and how long their resources were needed.
Project selection was “First In, First Out” and “Loudest Voice” focused, rather than aligned to strategic objectives or the evolving IT architecture plan. Without a structured prioritization process, the” loudest voice” often won, and strategic alignment suffered. The organization needed to improve demand management, effectively allocate resources, disseminate the right information to decision makers, and make data-driven decisions, that positioned the IT portfolio to meet strategic objectives and operational needs.
Solution
RW King delivered a six-month transformation focused on portfolio governance, resource optimization, and leadership alignment:
- Established an organizational-wide Portfolio Management Lifecycle and governance model across IT and business units.
- Collaborated with CIO and CGO to deploy a 12-month IT Project Roadmap
- Established resource management processes, dashboards, and trackers to allocate and forecast resources needs.
- Trained and coached over 100 IT staff, including PMs, developers, and managers, on resource estimation and scheduling.
- Launched bi-weekly resource planning meetings with IT leadership (8 IT units) to align priorities and reduce resource overload.
- Conducted resource alignment cycle to determine the impact of overallocation and negotiated adjustments with CIO, IT Leadership, and Senior Leadership
- Facilitated Strategic Portfolio Alignment workshops for senior leadership to provide guidance on intra-business unit project prioritization
Standardized intake, prioritization, and reporting artifacts, enabling consistent evaluation of project value, risk, and alignment with strategy.
Outcome
What began as a reactive, overextended IT environment began transforming into a strategically aligned, portfolio-driven delivery engine. The organization began moving from firefighting to foresight—balancing capacity with demand and aligning investments with enterprise goals.
- Transformed IT from reactive to strategic, with structured oversight and prioritized resource assignments
- Reduced burnout and improved delivery predictability through proactive planning and prioritization
- Enabled cross-functional alignment, ensuring IT investments supported enterprise-wide modernization
- Presented the IT portfolio to decision makers enabling a complete view of desires and needs. Optimized a $50M IT budget, by identifying low-value and duplicative projects
- Elevated resource management maturity from Level 1 to Level 3, enabling sustainable growth
- Improved stakeholder confidence through transparent reporting and data-driven decision-making
Conclusion
More than a PMO tune-up, this engagement injected structure, clarity, and balance to a high-pressure IT environment. The organization began shifting from reaction to proactive planning.
