Meet APM’s PMO of the Year and its ‘player-managers’

AlphaPlus is an organisation that knows the value of walking the walk when it comes to education. The consultancy has a stated commitment to improve educational assessments in the UK and overseas. But it also develops its own people in a way that’s proving transformational – not just in helping the small company win awards (like the 2024 APM PMO of the Year Award), but also in driving its dramatic growth: from a turnover of £4.4m in 2020 to £8.5m in 2024.

This rapid scaling involved AlphaPlus expanding from 20 to 60 people, as well as taking on a huge new workload. Projects worth many millions had to be delivered to tight government deadlines, so new digital assessments would be ready to go online as a new academic year approached.

Nick Karamanis, Head of PMO at AlphaPlus, recalls the challenge he faced: to develop the company’s project managers and project management office (PMO) systems and tools fast enough to keep up.

A force multiplier

His first priority was to build a people-focused PMO, which meant overhauling its structure and rapidly upskilling. The goal was to turn the team from project administrators into what Karamanis calls “player-managers” – equal partners with the project sponsor and stakeholders who collaborate in making decisions and contribute to the delivery of projects, services and trials.

“The player-manager is a hybrid project manager/PMO role designed to deliver excellence through versatility and collaboration within a group of highly technical and skilled staff,” says Karamanis. “And they’re now considered a force multiplier behind every project’s successful completion.”

The judges of the APM Project Management Awards praised the PMO’s “small but perfectly formed team” for achieving so much in such a short time – and for clearly enjoying themselves along the way. Indeed, the project cohort now refer to themselves as the “dream team”.

But such a transformation would take more than people alone. Karamanis reflects how the business would never have grown so fast and so successfully if it didn’t take the same revolutionary approach to innovation.

The biggest challenge for the PMO was that AlphaPlus was moving away from traditional paper exams and instead developing innovative, digital, on-screen assessments. The company won two multimillion-pound contracts to design and deliver such programmes. The PMO used the lessons learned from the first contract to document the infrastructure, processes and procedures used to develop services and provide support to end users. For the second contract, the PMO team developed the digital product offering further and updated the original set of documents accordingly – by capturing all the innovations related to the digital assessment and carrying them back to the original release with subsequent upgraded versions, using a robust change management control process.

All of which meant navigating a very steep learning curve.

An extra dimension

Internally, the PMO’s services were optimised by the adoption of digital, too, including rolling out a digital PMO portfolio dashboard in 2023 and a cloud-based integrated project management digital platform the following year. These innovations equipped the AlphaPlus board to make quick decisions about the ever-growing portfolio of increasingly complex projects and enabled the small PMO team to manage its workload efficiently while running many projects on several fronts.

Delivering such innovation while under pressure to meet programme milestones and delivery deadlines is always a challenge. Here, it meant the PMO integrating project management methods like agile to collaborate effectively with its digital developers. And alongside expanding the pool of project managers, it was crucial to “ensure continuity of development and delivery via institutional memory”.

“Experienced project managers are now required to take their early-career colleagues under their wing to onboard, mentor and coach them on the job to deliver projects effectively,” says Karamanis. “Having that extra dimension in their role gives our experienced project managers the satisfaction of shaping the PMO pipeline, while the early-career staff members in return feel secure and looked after.”

Crucially, those sweeping efforts in people development and digital transformation have delivered concrete results. In the past three years alone, the AlphaPlus PMO team has successfully delivered 105 projects globally. Its digital accounting platform allowed the PMO and finance departments to maximise the cost-to-value return of those projects, providing live-data financial reports and helping to keep the company profitable throughout that growth.

All of this helped the team scoop the coveted APM Award.

“Winning gives me the satisfaction that we’re on the right path, and the confidence and energy to continue driving the PMO digital transformation,” says Karamanis.

Indeed, to borrow a remark from the judges: it will be fascinating to see what the AlphaPlus PMO has built in a few years’ time.