Accelerating Strategic Programs and Enterprise PMO with Laminar™ at Melissa & Doug
Gravitas helped Melissa & Doug launch a PMO as a Service model with Laminar™ PPM in under 3 weeks, delivering enterprise wide visibility, 75% automated reporting coverage, and a stronger operating foundation ahead of Spin Master’s $950 million acquisition.
Client Overview
Melissa & Doug is a leading children’s toy brand recognized for its commitment to screen free, open ended play. As the organization grew, leadership needed a more structured and scalable way to manage an expanding portfolio of strategic initiatives, without the cost and complexity of a traditional enterprise PMO environment.
The Challenge
As Melissa & Doug scaled, the organization faced increasing complexity across its portfolio of strategic initiatives. Leadership lacked a consistent way to monitor project health across functions, compare priorities, and make informed decisions about funding and resources.
Project teams were using different methods to manage work and report status, making it difficult to maintain consistency, identify risks early, and keep leadership aligned. Without a centralized PMO structure, the business lacked the visibility and governance needed to ensure the right initiatives were moving forward at the right time.
Why Gravitas and Laminar™
Melissa & Doug needed more than a project tracking tool. They needed an operating model.
Laminar™ is positioned as a strategy execution and portfolio management platform built for leadership teams, with pre configured blueprints, real time insights, and rapid deployment. Gravitas paired that platform with hands on PMO leadership, onboarding, governance design, training, and change management to deliver a practical PMO as a Service model rather than just a software rollout.
As the client’s executive sponsor, Mike Macrie put it:
“There are portfolio management tools out there that are competent, but they tend to require significant investment and effort to maintain and keep them running. Being a medium-sized company, I did not think that they were appropriate, but I still wanted the dashboarding, visibility, and transparency. Laminar with in-built PMO best practices is a great fit.”
What Gravitas Delivered
1. PMO as a Service foundation in less than 3 weeks
To launch the solution, Gravitas organized onboarding workshops and training, aligned key stakeholders and personas, and bootstrapped the initial project data required for adoption. According to the live case study, Laminar was set up in hours and rolled out in less than 3 weeks, giving the client a working PMO capability at speed rather than a long, heavy implementation.
2. Enterprise wide visibility across strategic initiatives
One of the client’s biggest pain points was a lack of visibility into the health of projects across the enterprise. Laminar gave leadership a unified view of initiatives, dependencies, and delivery health, making it easier to intervene earlier and keep strategy execution on track. The current case study describes this as visibility across cross enterprise initiatives, with one click access to project health and dependencies.
In the client’s words:
“Most importantly, we can cancel projects that are not a priority for the organization. Redirect resources onto the projects that are important and only fund the projects moving forward that are important to the executive leadership.”
This shifted leadership from reactive project oversight to more active portfolio control.
3. Better intake, prioritization, and funding discipline
Before the engagement, the organization had no consistent prioritization process. Laminar introduced built in business value rating and a structured intake approach so initiatives and business cases could be evaluated before funding approval and kickoff. The existing case study explicitly notes that the client previously lacked both visibility and a process for prioritizing projects.
As the executive sponsor noted:
“The leadership dashboards are super important. We had no visibility into the status of our projects. We had project managers using inconsistent methods of reporting and managing projects and we had no process for prioritizing.”
4. Standardized reporting with built in intelligence and automation
Laminar reduced the repetitive manual work that often slows PMOs down. Gravitas used the platform to establish a more consistent reporting cadence and give teams auto generated reporting assets that covered a substantial portion of project communication needs. The live case study states that the auto generated report decks covered about 75% of project needs.
The client shared:
“The auto-generated report decks cover about 75% of the project needs. Without them, there would be no centralized reporting leading to project teams creating project status reports and other communication manually and inconsistently.”
This meant the PMO could spend less time chasing updates and formatting slides, and more time improving delivery quality and decision support.
5. Better planning through actionable portfolio metrics
The client also gained stronger planning capability through more structured portfolio data and KPI tracking. The current case study notes that prior to Laminar, the client had neither predefined KPIs nor the tools to measure progress consistently. Within weeks, they could begin measuring portfolio and project level metrics including investment mix, strategic versus functional spend, and resource utilization.
As the sponsor put it:
“The fact that we can project out what our spend will be across all projects by month is really important for our planning purposes.”
6. PMO maturity uplift through embedded best practices
Beyond visibility and reporting, Gravitas helped introduce practical PMO disciplines that are often missing in mid sized growth companies: portfolio, program, and project level governance, more consistent workflows, stronger reporting discipline, and better executive decision support. The existing case study explicitly credits Gravitas as the trusted partner in training and change management and notes that Laminar’s embedded best practices helped mature the PMO office.
As the executive sponsor said:
“These are big company best practices that you're introducing in small companies.”
Gravitas consulting was the client's trusted partner in training and change management. Laminar provided Portfolio, Program, and Project views – in a unified fashion. Laminar’s embedded best practices of Fortune 500 clients helped mature the PMO office.
6. Decision KPIs and metrics
The client neither had pre-defined key performance indicators nor the established tools to measure progress. Within three weeks, Laminar provided the client the ability to drive measurable strategic outcomes at the portfolio and the project levels.
Today, they can measure various portfolio metrics like the investment mix and strategic investments vs. overall functional investments. They can also measure and slice and dice project metrics like consultant and employee time utilization, backlog analysis, etc. In summary, Laminar PMO brings the best-practices of Fortune 500 companies at an affordable price for small to medium enterprises.
About Gravitas
Gravitas partners with QSR, retail, and consumer brands to drive growth, improve profitability, and execute transformation at scale.
Through a combination of senior advisory and proprietary platforms such as Laminar™ and Growth Hero™, we enable leadership teams to move from strategy to execution with speed, visibility, and discipline.
About Laminar™
Laminar™ empowers mid-sized enterprises with Fortune 500 best practices, enabling disciplined governance, real-time portfolio insights for faster and smarter decisions.
Laminar™ PPM leverages the Microsoft® Stack to deliver seamless integration, enterprise-grade security, and familiar tools like Azure, Power BI, and Microsoft 365. Empower your teams with smarter collaboration and data-driven decision-making—all in a solution you trust. Visit us on the Microsoft App Store.
If your organization is looking to improve planning efficiency, forecasting accuracy, or enterprise visibility, we can help.
KEY OUTCOMES
100%
increased visibility
3 weeks
set-up time
5x
impact