Building a Global Centre of Excellence from a PMO in Crisis
NCR South Pacific Area · Australia and New Zealand · 2017–2019
The Structural Problem
In 2017, the NCR South Pacific Area PMO — a 20-person team managing complex technology deployments for Australia and New Zealand's largest banks and retailers — had reached a structural inflection point. The team had operated through 12 months of operational instability and staff turnover. Escalation risk was high. The governance model was reactive. Revenue growth had plateaued.
The portfolio included some of the most operationally sensitive programs in the region: technology deployments for ANZ, NAB, Westpac, Coles, Woolworths, Kmart, and Australia Post. Failure in any one of these was not just commercial — it was reputational at national scale.
The organisation had a delivery team. What it did not have was a governance model built for the complexity and commercial accountability that the portfolio required.
The Diagnostic
The visible problem was instability and missed targets. The structural problem was different. There was no PMO mission aligned to the business strategy. No decision-rights framework. No accountability model connecting delivery performance to financial outcomes. No governance mechanism that created a feedback loop between what was being delivered and what the business needed commercially.
Applied through an ITEF lens, this was a Layer 2 (Governance Strength) and Layer 3 (Execution Architecture) problem presenting as a delivery problem. Fixing delivery without rebuilding the governance and execution foundations would have produced short-term improvement and structural recurrence.
The Response
I built the governance model from the mission outward — not from the process inward. The PMO mission was explicitly aligned to the SPA Services strategy: improve customer advocacy, grow revenue, and improve operating income. Every structural decision flowed from that alignment.
The governance changes were deliberate and sequenced. I introduced PMO KPIs tied directly to commercial outcomes — not just delivery milestones. I established RACI frameworks and Operating Level Agreements with internal NCR support functions, ending the ambiguity about accountability that had allowed issues to compound unresolved. PMs became accountable for accurate financial forecasting, not just delivery progress.
I restructured the bid review process to ensure margin visibility before commitment — working directly with Sales to agree on Transaction Services margins. This meant the PMO was no longer inheriting commitments it had not stress-tested.
Simultaneously, I partnered with Boston Consulting Group on a global vendor management initiative — reducing Total Cost of Ownership and establishing a discipline that extended beyond the immediate portfolio.
On the customer side, I introduced post-project and quarterly BAU customer surveys to measure satisfaction and identify emerging issues before they escalated. I built direct relationships with the senior contacts at key accounts — not to manage problems, but to understand what the organisation could do better and where new opportunities existed.
The most significant program I delivered during this period was the national deployment of the Reserve Bank of Australia's new polymer banknotes — upgrading NCR devices across the country's major banks (ANZ, NAB, Westpac, Bendigo Bank) and retailers (Coles, Kmart, Woolworths, Big W, 7-Eleven). This program ran without executive escalation. That was not an accident.
The Outcomes
The zero-escalation result over two years — across a portfolio of this sensitivity and scale — was the most significant indicator. It was not the absence of problems. Complex programs have problems. It was the presence of a governance structure that identified and resolved them before they required executive intervention. That is the measure of governance I built correctly.
Additional case studies — Airservices Australia (CMATS cross-agency governance), NCR APAC ERP rollout (14 countries, >90% adoption), Visy Global Logistics (LEAN transformation, 5 countries) — forthcoming.