How we built a CIO Delivery Office for a European technology business

The challenge

Group.one’s planning had simply outgrown its tooling. Around 80 people across legal, finance, marketing, product and engineering fed a quarterly plan through a shared workbook — a system that had served well at a smaller scale, but was now working against the teams using it.

• Live data changed while reviews were under way, making status decks hard to reconcile.
• Copies of the workbook multiplied across stakeholders, with no single authoritative version.
• Monthly status reporting across the portfolio absorbed days of project-manager effort every cycle.
• The organisation was ready for planning infrastructure to match its scale.

What we did

We set up a Delivery Office reporting directly to the CIO, then worked on three fronts: the planning system, the reporting, and hands-on delivery of the quarter’s programmes.

• Re-platformed quarterly planning onto Jira — a standardised data model, custom fields and a workflow mirroring the real planning process, live for Q2 2025.
• Automated status reporting: structured extracts plus a Python generator producing the required slides in about a second — reducing monthly reporting effort for a large, complex portfolio from days to hours.
• Delivered three of the quarter’s programmes directly — including enabling the Herald brand to sell domains through its own website, integrating five systems into one purchase journey.
• Ran weekly BRAG-rated status reporting, dependency maps and live dashboards showing every owner their items.

The outcome

Every team now plans in one system with a real-time view of the same data. Executive reporting is generated, not assembled. The domain-sales platform was tested end to end, from search through purchase to fulfilment.