Local Government · Cambridgeshire County Council

Building a Pioneer PMO: Cambridgeshire Highways & Transport

PMOMicrosoft Project OnlinePower BIGovernanceChange Management

Background

Cambridgeshire County Council’s Highways & Transport department manages an annual programme budget of over £84 million as part of the Place & Sustainability Directorate, accountable for 10% of the council’s total annual spend. Delivering at that scale demands not just good project managers, but a mature, transparent, and auditable approach to portfolio governance.

Starting Point

Roscoe Gibbs joined the department in a junior PMO role and quickly identified significant scope to improve how the portfolio was managed. Teaching himself Power BI to an advanced level alongside developing a strong grounding in planning tools and critical path methodology, he began building a detailed business case for a bespoke PPM platform, originally designed around Asta Power Projects. The knowledge base built during that period, covering portfolio visibility, data modelling, and reporting governance, proved critical to everything that followed.

Adapting to a Changed Landscape

In 2020, Cambridgeshire County Council adopted Microsoft Project Online as its enterprise-wide PPM platform, delivered by Wellingtone. This represented a significant change of direction from the platform the PMO had originally envisaged, requiring several months of preparatory work to be pivoted. Rather than treating this as a setback, Roscoe made the case to the IT team to allocate budget for a bespoke customisation of the solution specifically for the Major Infrastructure sub-department within Highways & Transport.

The result was a custom Enterprise Project Type (EPT) built to precisely match the department’s delivery methodology. It was designed with two objectives in mind: detailed enough to address a set of significant internal audit recommendations that had previously highlighted governance gaps, and flexible enough to underpin a longer-term vision of portfolio-wide scalability across the whole directorate.

What Was Built

The PMO then drove a period of sustained innovation across the Microsoft Power Platform, pushing well beyond standard Project Online functionality.

The Power BI star schema delivered by the Microsoft solutions partner was substantially extended and rebuilt, incorporating live data bridged from SharePoint, Enterprise Resource Planning systems, and RAID logs to create a unified, real-time portfolio intelligence platform. Detailed reports were built for every level of the organisation, from individual project managers through to senior leadership, providing a single, consistent picture of the portfolio at all times.

Further innovations followed:

  • Governance-embedded optimism bias controls: Bias parameters built directly into Project Online’s governance gateways, allowing the PMO to set and refine risk tolerance as projects moved from assumptions to knowns. Individual subjectivity removed from risk parameters; PMO accountability built into the process.
  • Geographical dependency mapping: Satellite mapping Shapefiles integrated into the platform to produce live visual representations of infrastructure project dependencies across the county.
  • Self-serve project board reporting: Power BI embedded within a Project Board PDF format, enabling any project manager to refresh their reports with real-time data at the touch of a button, eliminating significant manual reporting overhead and delivering immediate stakeholder visibility.
  • Custom database integration: Internal capability developed using Microsoft PowerApps to build bespoke databases and integrate them with the Project Platform, extending PPM transparency beyond the boundaries of the standard toolset.

The model scaled progressively: first embedded within Major Infrastructure, then rolled out across the full Highways & Transport department, and subsequently extended to the wider Place & Sustainability Directorate.

Cultural Shift

The technical architecture was only part of the work. Alongside platform development, the PMO drove a fundamental shift in how the organisation approached project data, accountability, and governance.

The consistent message was that the system is everyone’s friend. An end-to-end, auditable record of every project protects project managers, enables genuinely data-driven decision making, and gives the PMO the standing to act as a critical friend, identifying where support is needed, where challenge is appropriate, and where escalation is required.

Strong buy-in was achieved from senior leadership. Project managers who had previously viewed reporting as an overhead began to see real value in the tools and used them accordingly. One version of the truth, owned collectively.

“Our PMO’s message is that the system is everyone’s friend. Our ability to capture and integrate data on a self-serve basis creates an end-to-end, auditable journey right across the PPM cycle. It generates transparency and joint ownership of important decisions.”

Roscoe Gibbs, PMO Lead, Cambridgeshire Highways & Transport

Recognition

This work was recognised by Wellingtone, the 2025 Microsoft Partner of the Year for Project and Portfolio Management, in their published case study on Cambridgeshire Highways & Transport. Their assessment noted that the PMO’s approach demonstrates how the Microsoft Project Platform can be creatively adapted to scale up and out, and highlighted the continuous improvement roadmap, the depth of Power BI capability developed, and the cultural transformation achieved alongside the technical work.

Results

  • Internal audit recommendations addressed through structured governance, portfolio controls, and a fully auditable project record
  • Custom EPT built and embedded for Major Infrastructure; scaled to the full Highways & Transport department and extended to Place & Sustainability
  • £84m annual programme budget under managed portfolio governance
  • Advanced Power BI reporting delivering self-serve portfolio intelligence at every level of the organisation
  • Governance-embedded optimism bias controls removing individual subjectivity from project risk management
  • PMO personnel upskilled through a bespoke Microsoft Project training programme, acting as internal ambassadors for best practice
  • Cultural shift achieved: data-driven accountability embedded throughout the project lifecycle
  • Senior leadership and sponsor engagement secured for ongoing programme expansion
  • Work formally recognised in a published partner case study

This engagement was delivered by Roscoe Gibbs in his capacity as PMO Lead at Cambridgeshire County Council. The case study documents his approach, design decisions, and the outcomes achieved during that engagement.