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What Is the Teal Book and Who Is It For?

The Teal Book is described as *government project delivery’s code of practice for project delivery. *In essence, it’s an official playbook of best practices, principles, and processes that all government departments and agencies are expected to follow for projects and programmes.

It aligns with the Government’s Functional Standard for Project Delivery (GovS 002). This ensures that everyone from Senior Responsible Owners (SROs) to project managers and PMO analysts is on the same page. The guidance is comprehensive and intended for all project delivery practitioners. It is relevant whether you oversee a project portfolio at the enterprise level or manage day-to-day project controls within a department​. By consolidating knowledge in one place, the Teal Book aims to foster a consistent approach across the UK Government’s extensive project landscape.

Notably, the Teal Book joins the UK Government’s family of color-coded best-practice manuals (alongside HM Treasury’s well-known Green Book for business cases and Magenta Book for evaluation). It fills a crucial gap by focusing on how to deliver projects successfully. According to HM Treasury, the Teal Book is “the definitive guide for project delivery in government”, reflecting lessons learned and expertise from across government. Its release signals a strong message: effective project delivery is now a top priority, backed by central guidance that all teams should adopt.

Inside the Teal Book: Guidance and Structure

So what’s actually inside the Teal Book? The guidance is structured to cover the full lifecycle and ecosystem of project delivery – from planning and governance through to execution, assurance, and benefits realization. Key themes and practices highlighted in the Teal Book include:

• Continuous Professional Development: Emphasis on building project delivery capability through training, coaching, and knowledge sharing. The guide underscores developing skilled people and a learning culture as foundational to project success.
• Streamlined Planning and Delivery: Flying in the face of perceived wisdom from the agile software delivery community, The Teal Book promotes rigorous upfront planning and clear delivery structures to set projects up for success. This approach, it argues, is backed by research, noting that analysis of 20,000 projects found that those with the best start-of-project planning had 20% lower costs and were delivered 15% faster.
• Risk-Based Control Measures: Rather than a one-size-fits-all governance, the guidance calls for tailoring oversight and controls to a project’s risk and complexity. In practice, this could mean leaner governance for lower-risk initiatives and more robust checkpoints for critical, high-risk programs.
• Enhancing Performance and Outcomes: A strong thread throughout the Teal Book is driving better project outcomes and value for the public. ​It isn’t enough to deliver on time and budget; projects should realize their intended benefits and longer-term value. (The National Audit Office notes that the Teal Book explicitly covers ensuring projects deliver value and benefits​). To support this, the guidance includes best practices on benefits management, post-project evaluation, and continuous improvement, so organizations learn from past projects to improve future delivery.

The Teal Book is broken down into six sections:

• Part A Project delivery in government
• Part B: Tailoring and Adapting
• Part C: Managing Portfolios
• Part D: Managing Programmes and Projects
• Part E: Planning and Control
• Part F: Solution Delivery

The book provides practical guidance on governance arrangements, roles and responsibilities. For example, clarifying the role of the SRO and project boards. It also integrates existing good practices like the Construction Playbook and other functional guidance into a coherent whole. By bringing these elements together, it serves as an authoritative one-stop handbook for how to run government projects successfully.

When is a book not a book?

Curiously, the so-called Teal Book isn’t actually a book at all. The guidance is not available to buy as a physical book, nor is it available for e-readers. The ‘Book’ is a searchable guide on a new government site: projectdelivery.gov.uk .

The PMO as a Support Office

Interestingly, The Teal Book frames the PMO as a ‘Support Office‘. This term has caused ire in the PMO profession in the past. Some PMO practitioners feel that calling a PMO a “support office” undermines their important and often strategic role in guiding and assuring delivery while ensuring governance is upheld. But before the PMO communities get our their pitchforks and protest this negative portrayal, it is worth taking note of what the guide actually has to say!

Beyond the title, the depiction of the PMO is one that many will be familiar with. It notes that the scope of PMOs (support offices) is very much dependent on the needs of the team members and the complexity of the scale of work. It goes on to note that this means it is “difficult to define a standard support office”. However, the definition of individual services provided by PMOs can be standardised.

The guide also described ‘higher level support offices’ such as programme offices, and details the types of functions and services that may be delivered by a Portfolio Office including:

• ensuring effective and efficient processes for project delivery investment planning and decision-making are defined and embedded
• analysing portfolio work components for contribution to vision and strategy, ongoing viability and benefits to be realised
• allocating resources to work components and resolving conflicts for limited or specialist resources
• identifying and managing dependencies between work components
• identifying and managing the threats and opportunities arising from the aggregate work component risks and the portfolio-level strategic risks
• ensuring the portfolio’s work components are prioritised and balanced, providing analysis and advice on content that maximises strategic contribution while considering the organisation’s and, where relevant, society’s capacity to deliver and absorb change
• monitoring and analysing the performance of the portfolio, escalating delivery issues
• overseeing the allocation of funding and monitoring in-year spend against the portfolio plan

How Can the Teal Book Help PMO Professionals?

For PMO professionals in government, the Teal Book is designed to be an everyday reference that can elevate project delivery performance. Here’s how it can help PMO teams:

Standardizing Best Practices: Provides a common framework and language for project delivery across departments. PMOs can use it to assure projects, and support projects to meet Government standards.

Guiding Project Setup and Planning: Helps PMOs advocate for good practice in the early phases of projects. Strong upfront planning can significantly cut costs and timelines. While the guide does not go as far as mandating specific planning approaches, it is clear on what ‘good’ looks like.

Guidance on Tailoring: Offers practical guidance on tailoring the guidance to create an organisational level approach to project delivery, with due consideration to the organisation, scale, cost, timescales, risk and achievability. This guidance project risk, avoiding both over-bureaucratization and under-scrutiny.

Building Capability and Continuous Improvement: Encourages a measured approach to continuous improvement where improvements can be expected to add value. The book advocates use of the Project delivery continuous improvement assessment framework for assessing capability, rather than maturity models such as OPM3 or P3M3.

Ensuring Value and Benefits Realization: Keeps the end goal firmly in view – delivering value for citizens and taxpayers. A dedicated chapter on Benefits Management, shows clear links back to the Green Book and maps benefits to objectives and outcomes back to Government policy as shown in the image below.

UK Government Teal Book Figure 19.1 Mapping benefits to objectives and outcomes within the policy to delivery chain

Beyond PRINCE2: How the Teal Book’s Remit Is Wider

Prince2 Processes

Many PMO staff will be familiar with PRINCE2, the traditional project management methodology that has been a mainstay in the UK for decades. It’s important to understand that The Teal Book is not a replacement for day-to-day project management techniques like PRINCE2. It is broader in scope. In fact, the Teal Book encompasses guidance for project, programme, and portfolio management. This gives it a far wider remit than PRINCE2 alone. One of the contributing authors of the Teal Book noted that it effectively replaces PRINCE2, MSP, and MoP for government projects by integrating best practices from all three levels.

Rather than prescribing a single method, the Teal Book is methodology-agnostic. Teams can continue to use delivery methods like PRINCE2 or agile frameworks within the structure of the Teal Book’s guidance. For example, a department might still run a project using PRINCE2 processes, but the governance of that project (roles, controls, alignment to outcomes) would follow the Teal Book’s principles. The key difference is one of breadth and context: PRINCE2 focuses on how to manage a project’s tasks and stages, whereas the Teal Book provides an overarching framework for why and how projects should be run in the government context, ensuring they contribute to strategic goals and deliver public value.

For PMO practitioners operating at the Enterprise or Portfolio level, this “wider lens” approach will be welcome – encouraging practitioners to take a more holistic view of project delivery. This means looking not just project execution, but also how their project fits into bigger programmes, and how benefits will be realized after project closure.

Key Takeaways for PMO Teams

For those in PMO roles, here are some actionable takeaways and recommendations from the Teal Book’s guidance:

Adopt the Common Code of Practice: Make the Teal Book your go-to reference for managing projects. Ensure your PMO’s templates, processes, and governance frameworks are updated to reflect its best practices​. This will help align your projects with the wider government standards and make your life easier when interfacing with other departments or audit bodies.

1. Focus on Early Planning and Setup: Invest time and effort at the start of a project to define clear objectives, robust plans, and appropriate governance. The data shows that doing so pays off – projects with strong early planning can cut costs by a fifth and speed up delivery by up to 15%. Use the Teal Book’s planning and business case guidance to set a solid foundation.
2. Tailor Governance to your environment and delivery scope: One size does not fit all in project controls. Use the Teal Book’s risk-based approach to tailor your approach and decide how much and process is needed for each initiative. For straightforward projects, simplify your checkpoints; for complex or high-risk ones, don’t shy away from rigorous scrutiny. This balance will improve efficiency and prevent both micromanagement and insufficient oversight.
3. Build Capability and Learn Continuously: Encourage your project teams to pursue ongoing professional development and learn from past projects’ lessons. The Teal Book highlights continuous improvement and skill development as keys to success
4. Keep an Eye on Benefits and Outcomes: Don’t measure success only by schedule and budget. Track whether projects are delivering their promised benefits and strategic outcomes. The Teal Book puts outcomes at the center of project delivery – a reminder to PMOs to set up benefit KPIs, monitor them through the project lifecycle, and conduct post-project evaluations. . This ensures projects truly contribute value and that lessons are fed back into future work.

By focusing on these areas, PMO professionals in central and local government can translate the high-level guidance of the Teal Book into day-to-day practices that improve project and portfolio delivery performance.

A Wider Lesson for PMOs Everywhere

While the Teal Book is tailored for UK Government use, its insights carry relevance beyond Whitehall. PMOs outside the UK public sector can also learn from this comprehensive approach to project delivery. The emphasis on clear governance, outcome-driven planning, risk tailoring, and capability building are universally sound principles for any project environment. And by keeping the standard to a level above frameworks, the guidance will help PMO leaders rise above endless, tired debates about agile vs waterfall approaches. In many ways, the Teal Book reflects a modern, integrated approach to project management – one that bridges strategy and execution.

For example, private sector PMOs may find value in adopting a similar “benefits-driven” mindset, ensuring that projects align with strategic goals and deliver real value (not just outputs). The idea of customizing oversight to project risk can help any organization avoid bureaucracy overload on simple projects and tighten control on the most critical initiatives. Additionally, the focus on continuous professional development resonates globally: skilled people are the cornerstone of successful projects, whether in government or industry.

In summary, the launch of the Teal Book marks an important milestone for project delivery professionals in the UK Government. It provides a clear, accessible guide that PMO staff at all levels can use to navigate the complexities of projects and programmes. By following its guidance, and by comparing notes with established methods like PRINCE2, PMOs can strengthen their role as enablers of successful project outcomes. Whether you’re working on a major infrastructure program or a digital service rollout, the Teal Book offers practical wisdom to help you deliver value efficiently and consistently. It’s a welcome addition to the project management toolkit, and its principles are well worth understanding for PMO teams both inside and outside government.