Case study 09 of 09

Multi-team Delivery Portfolio

Resource allocation across concurrent projects

Planning and overseeing 5+ large-scale, multi-tenant projects with 50+ people across 7+ specialised teams.

• Role: Associate Project Manager
• Organisation: IT Research & Development, Islington College
• Period: Dec 2023 – Jul 2025
• Domain: Software delivery · education, marketing and IT clients
• Scope of involvement: Delivery (managed project delivery and progress)

In numbers

• 50+: cross-functional members
• 7+: specialised teams
• 5+: large-scale, multi-tenant projects

Overview

Islington College's IT Research & Development unit builds large-scale, multi-tenant systems for educational institutions, marketing organisations and IT offices. Delivery runs on specialised teams: frontend, backend, QA, DevOps and database.

Product challenge

Several large projects ran at once and drew on one shared pool of specialists. Two decisions sat with me: which projects to accept, and how to allocate people so that every project kept moving.

My role

Project management and delivery across a portfolio.

• Led and allocated work across 50+ cross-functional members in 7+ specialised teams.
• Ran feasibility and effort estimates before accepting projects, aligning scope with each client's business goals and technical requirements.
• Built and maintained portfolio roadmaps covering tasks, timelines, milestones and resource allocation.
• Defined the product scope for AI Tutor, a RAG-style chatbot that answers strictly from user-uploaded PDFs and books.

Key work

• Feasibility gate: effort estimates before any project was accepted.
• Portfolio roadmaps: tasks, timelines, milestones and resource allocation in one view.
• Allocation: work assigned across frontend, backend, QA, DevOps and database teams.
• AI Tutor: product scope for a chatbot that answers only from uploaded documents.

Delivery approach

• Gate: a feasibility and effort estimate before a project is accepted.
• Align: scope matched to the client's business goals and technical requirements.
• Plan: one portfolio roadmap across all projects.
• Track: the roadmap used to follow progress across all systems.

Outcome

Planned and oversaw delivery of 5+ large-scale, multi-tenant projects for educational institutions, marketing organisations and IT offices.

Skills demonstrated

Portfolio planning · Feasibility and effort estimation · Resource allocation · Roadmapping · Stakeholder alignment