Case Study
Digital PMO Platform
27% staff time saved for project teams on infrastructure programmes
Building project reporting tools for dynamic infrastructure projects
Overview
A project and portfolio reporting platform used across 40+ government-funded infrastructure programmes. As the sole Product Manager, I owned the product end to end, from early discovery through to growth and adoption across infrastructure projects in the UK.
Role
Product Manager
Sector
Infrastructure / Design Management
Goal
Make project teams more efficient and effective
The Problem
Infrastructure project teams spend large chunks of time on manual reporting, time that could be spent providing direct value to clients. Project managers spent hours compiling data, chasing updates and producing progress reports by hand, repeatable processes waiting for automation. There was no central view across portfolios, and cost and schedule risks went undetected in long paper trails of data. The tool that existed was a proof of concept that needed to become a real product.
My Role
Ownership & Scope
Product Manager. Responsible for product vision, strategy, roadmap, discovery, backlog, stakeholder management, team leadership and go-to-market. Also served as Scrum Master across an international cross-functional team of engineers, stakeholder groups and customer success.
The Approach
Ran structured discovery with project, programme and portfolio managers across major client organisations: 1:1 interviews, facilitated workshops and surveys. Used Jobs-to-be-Done to understand what teams were actually trying to achieve and where their processes varied, and journey mapping to find the highest-friction points in their workflows. Validated assumptions through prototype testing and sandbox environments before committing to build.
The Solution
Automated project reporting workflows, removing the manual data handling that was eating team time. Automated data processing across key project management datasets, giving project managers early visibility of cost and schedule issues. Delivered custom reporting features requested directly through user research. Championed new deployment approaches with the engineering team that transformed deployment speed.
Results
The Outcome
27%
Reduction in FTE time through reporting automation
15%
Improvement in deployment conversion from research-driven feature delivery
60% / 30%
Reduction in deployment time and engineering effort via better deployment processes
Six-figure
Client value delivered
40+
Programmes using the platform
Reflection
“Projects are naturally variable, with changing client demands, so one of the biggest challenges was catering for different requirements and datasets across similar projects. We had to build a system that could work with different dataset formats, and UI that let project teams quickly sandbox visuals and reports specific to their project.”
Roly Hancock © 2026