The New Purpose of the PMO & Why Your Org Still Needs One

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Galen Low: Paper Pushers. Process Police. Party Poopers. The Project Management Office often has a slew of unflattering nicknames. Despite starting out with a vision to create consistency, scalability, and chaos free value delivery, what the folks feel on the receiving end is sometimes restriction, bureaucracy, and homogeneity.

In fact, to some folks, a project management office sounds more like a stale anachronism than a hotbed of innovation. But in a world where non-PM roles are increasingly expected to deliver projects, and where emerging tech is aggressively forcing us to change the way we work, it's possible that the PMO will actually be the key to unlocking the future of project management.

Hey folks, thanks for tuning in. My name is Galen Low with the Digital Project Manager. We are a community of digital professionals on a mission to help each other get skilled, get confident, and get connected so that we can amplify the value of project management in a digital world. If you want to hear more about that, head on over to thedpm.com/membership.

All right, today I wanted to share a live discussion we hosted, where we put a few different perspectives on a collision course, combining insights from a respected agency PM team leader, a prominent industry analyst, and a PMO guru, to explore what organizations could do to design the PMO of the future, and whether it's even worth it to try.

My three panelists were Lauren Selley from Code and Theory, Olivia Montgomery from Capterra, and Bruno Morgante from The PMO Leader. Here's how the conversation went.

We are here to talk about the future of the ubiquitous Project Management Office, endearingly referred to as The PMO. And most of us know this as a central body that oversees project delivery in an organization. It's usually the person or group tasked with bringing consistency to how projects are delivered, managing the 50,000 foot view of all active and upcoming projects, and gathering the knowledge, data, and lessons learned from successful and less successful projects.

Some of us also know it as a big pain in the behind, adding complexity to things that should be simple, stifling creativity, rigidly enforcing dated practices, and generally sticking their noses in other departments businesses. Some organizations don't even have a PMO anymore. They have opted for things like a strategic enablement office.

And maybe a project management community of practice. I have this hunch that the PMO could be on the brink of a rebirth, and here's why. Project management, as a skill, is on the rise. But not every project is led by a trained project manager. Roles from specialists to executives are now expected to be able to deliver projects.

And meanwhile, projects are more prevalent than ever, but they're taking many different shapes and need to be tailored in their approach to fit their specific needs, and in untrained hands, that only really adds risk. So whereas the PMO has in the past been seen simply as a governing body, Could it be that maybe it's actually an innovation hub for exploring new ways of delivering projects in a safe and hopefully unchaotic way? So that's my theory. That's what I'm here to find out and validate today with my expert friends. 

And really just to lead off and set the scene, I thought I'd pick on Olivia, but also I want thoughts from everybody. But I'll start with Olivia. From your perspective, do PMOs have a bad rap? And why is the answer yes?

Olivia Montgomery: The answer is yes, in most cases. You touched on it a bit. The idea that a PMO, or any time that you're introducing standardizations, And best practices and policies and procedures, it gets really rigid pretty much immediately. And I think people automatically think, oh, this is it. We're going to have 1 template for everything.

Maybe 2 if you're feeling spicy and that's it. They just default to that, that rigid thinking of this is how it's going to be, and that just doesn't work. So they need to definitely be thinking about it as an innovation hub. You absolutely need to be able to building in flexibility and adaptability into these policies and procedures.

And on the other side, I think we see a lot is maybe the wrong people getting promoted or hired into the PMO leadership role. It could be somebody who is a very good project manager themselves. Maybe it was really good at managing the individual project, but then when you put them in charge of the portfolio at the higher level, they lack that ability to zoom out.

While still being able to zoom in or the opposite happens, you can get bring in a leader who is only good at the high level view and thinking and strategizing and they're not able to dive in and really connect and help and understand the pain points of the day to day project management. We need a lot more dynamic leaders that have that ability to zoom in and zoom out.

If you have, sometimes you have to do it hour by hour. And I think identifying the right kind of people and talent. To lead is important and changing the mindset to a much more flexible, adaptable, let's get it done, not do it this way kind of mindset. 

Galen Low: I love that. The people who understand that standardization doesn't mean rigidity.

Bruno, you've been leading PMOs a while. I'm imagining you fought that fight. How have you tried to educate folks about the fact that, yeah, the PMO isn't just here, to slap you on the wrist whenever you do something a bit out of the lines? 

Bruno Morgante: It's a difficult battle. It's a difficult battle for a lot of for a lot of PMO leaders out there.

It's important to see how PMOs are evolving into, and I have seen it over the past few years. Of course, not all of them, but you have seen it also in the comments about moving PMOs into a different into a different place that might be the case. In a nutshell, it's not about having a rigidity and and structure only the old concept of governance and control PMO, which is still is the picture for a lot of people when they think about PMO, when they hear PMO, that's what they associate it with.

It's not the case anymore. It's about being in a position to enable projects to be successful. Olivia mentioned adaptability as one of the, and this is going to be one of the keywords that I'm sure we're going to touch a lot in the next few minutes. 

Galen Low: I do want to come back to that in terms of things that you're seeing, but I wanted to flip over first to agency land because Lauren and I are agency folks.

And what I found, at least in my experience, is that sometimes agencies resist the word PMO and instead we gravitate towards other terms like delivery leadership or client services and the like, all of which are fine. But I'm wondering, Lauren, from your perspective do you think that's just semantics?

Has that been your experience? And Is there maybe some kind of like allergic reaction to the idea of a PMO in agency culture? 

Lauren Selley: I think there's definitely some type of allergic reaction, but it's pretty clear where it's coming from. And I'm curious, especially if you want to put it in the chat, like how many people really even knew or know what a PMO's goals are?

Because I know that for myself, even the first five or six years of my career, PMO or project management department were pretty much used interchangeably and no one ever really talked about what they were trying to achieve. And I think that there is a big challenge with the stigma associated with what a PMO does, right?

You're trying to align projects with these business objectives and drive organizational success. If you had a group called the organizational success team, do you think anyone would object to it, right? Versus, oh, a PMO office? They're like, oh, like Olivia said, process, very rigid, can only go one way.

Agency life is very hustle harder. Let's go fast fast. And in the last 10 or so years, with the rise of agile and the popularity of the term agile, everyone sees this as this big buzzword. We need to be adaptable. We need to be able to move quickly. We need to be able to change quickly. And they associate PMOs with process and they see process as the.

Enemy of the ability to move fast, which is actually very ironic because the ability to put in place repeatable, successful delivery practices or, the things that you need to be able to manage a project successfully. Absolutely can create efficiency and allow you to move faster. It's just a misconception about the terms that we're using and how we're applying them to the ways that we're trying to optimize the work that we're doing.

Galen Low: Really like that. We're like, there's this semantic dodge where we're like, we'll just use another word, but then we still forget sometimes what the actual purpose is and how that can help us not treat every project as this unique snowflake, but actually it has some standardization that is still adaptable and flexible and agile.

And also, by the way, a lot of these agency projects, and you probably aren't allowed to talk about some of the stuff that you're working on right now, but there are some mega projects happening within these agencies. And you can't just fly by the seat of your pants anymore. And I think that's something that a lot of agencies are starting to come to terms with as well.

Lauren Selley: I couldn't agree more. I would absolutely say that. And as someone who's working on a mega project right now, there's a lot of customization that comes into play when it comes to client services. And That is one of the big pieces where process can be scary because everyone's saying, no, we can't say that it only works this way when the client needs it to work that way.

And we want to be a good client partner, but that doesn't mean that there aren't still learnings that we can take away from other similar projects and delivery in the past and make it a more successful outcome for everyone. 

Galen Low: Love that. 

Let's jam on some of those like sort of future notions of the PMO and like Bruno, you had mentioned that you've seen some interesting changes and Desiree in the chat, I'm not sure if the chat got to everybody, this notion of having a PMO under the innovation sort of team and division. Yeah, maybe let's just start with you, Bruno, and just what you've seen recently that you like about the evolution of the PMO and what impact that has had on projects and organizations.

Bruno Morgante: I over the past few years, so not just recently, but it is something that we have seen in the past few years. This transition that I mentioned from a governance and control PMO into enabling PMO. As I said, enabling is the key word here. It is about moving away from the concept of. One size fits all, one we are the guardians, we control, we govern into transforming into, we are here to enable you, your projects to be successful, to achieve what they want to achieve, to deliver value to the organization.

A few things that I have observed, it is definitely PMOs providing tools, resources, trainings, and development for the people in the organization, not only PMs, but all the people in the organization to explain why doing things in a certain way. would provide an added value. You can see PMOs moving away from this idea of there is one single way of running projects in this organization.

And they definitely started to embrace different approaches, adaptive, predictive, hybrid, but then of course, also having tailored approaches for specific type of projects. And this goes very much with the idea, with the concept of adaptability, the idea that we need to adapt the world around us is changing.

Projects are all different. We need to adapt. We cannot have only one. There is also another component that I have seen and I like it a lot. It's the human side of things. It's this increased the focus on what I call the essential skills, communication, leadership, collaboration, adaptability, strategic thinking, just to name a few of them.

And this is applying these in your day to day life as a PMO. puts you in a different relationship with the other pieces of the organization. It's not anymore just, Oh, there is that group of guardians over there. We are all in this together and we need to make it work. And what with these PMOs, those that are evolving into this journey, they also started to play a different role into.

How the projects are selected, how the projects are connected, related to the strategic objectives of the organization. So again, you see them moving away from, we have to deliver whatever comes down the pipeline into start looking at what makes sense to deliver. And this is of course, entering into the portfolio management, but it is something that you see more and more of those successful PMOs.

Now, recently, Galen, if you want to just focus in the last few months, definitely the same PMOs that started this evolution journey, you have seen them starting applying artificial intelligence into their day to day life. And these of course, open another big Possibly a lot of possibilities for improvements in processes, way of working and in supporting projects being successful.

But again, you and already should be into this transformation journey instead of just being that's the only way that's us and you need to follow us. It's different. We are in this together. 

Galen Low: I like that sort of collaborative tone and also just the human angle, right? Like the bad rap that, I treat it, I tricked all of you to fall into.

And agree with is that, this is like robotic PMO, my reputation, but actually Bruno, something you talk about a lot in your material is a human centered PMO. 

Olivia Montgomery: All right. I have to jump in. I love that so much. And I think that's where the strength and flexibility and adaptability with PMO, especially in the leadership roles of them is so important because you want to look at more the tools and structures and standardizations that the PMO provides.

Are there to help you make less emotional decisions to help catch decision making biases, logic fallacies that you have. If you're helping them understand we're giving you these tools to help you manage and lead people that can be helpful as well. And trying to think of a PMO is okay, you help us make thoughtful, methodical, accurate, good decisions by, like I said, using tools that kind of limit and account for emotional biases.

Personal motivations, department motivations, providing that the leadership of the people. It's not that you need to follow this project plan and do these tasks. Helping them understand that using tools like RACI Charts and other things help the people make better decisions and work better together.

Galen Low: I love that. Tools are not the skills. 

Lauren, I wanted to swing back to something you had said about the sort of adaptability and tailoring. Arguably there is so much humanity in the client services world because you are thinking about how can I fit into this client who does not work in our organization, does not have the same strategic objectives as our organization.

We need to help serve that. Could you talk me through, maybe at a high level, what you've seen in terms of how that adaptable process works? It's okay, we have a way of doing things, but it's not a cookie cutter. Or maybe it's not a cookie cutter, that's that rigid. We can bend it. But what does that process look like?

Lauren Selley: Absolutely. I think there are a couple of ways that you see people interested in your process, and they may or may not want to just make sure that you have a framework in place to be able to deliver successfully. But also, I am a giant advocate of saying that project managers are not just box checkers.

And quite frankly, if you are just checking a box, You're probably not delivering or executing on the role in its entirety and to be able to execute successfully, you can't just hand someone a tool belt of templates and of checklists and say, great, you're going to be 100 percent successful at delivering the project.

And that's why I also love this human element to it, the soft skills and the ability to collaborate, understand client goals and their objectives. Are the only things that really enable you to be successful when you are looking at how to make tradeoffs, right? When you're looking at when decisions and things get tough and you're having to have those hard conversations, those crucial conversations, if you will.

Negotiation skills. All of that comes into play when you want to make both teams successful. Everyone knows that not every project is going to follow any type of exact cookie cutter template. Everything is chaos every day. And we're always trying to look at the ways that we can make the best decisions, not only for our team to protect our teams, but to still drive those outcomes of what the clients come to you to deliver in the first place.

Those big goals. So I do think there is the ability to tailor everything, but it comes with having soft skills and the ability to build that relationship, understand the bigger purpose behind the scope, ask the hard questions about the why behind things versus just taking requirements blindly and saying, oh, that's what we're building because that's what you want, right?

You have to understand if it makes sense. I come from a business analyst background, and that's how I started my project management career. So when you really get into the nitty gritty of the why clients are trying to do the work that they're trying to do, it can help you not only execute the current project, but lay the groundwork for a future relationship of growth and other projects that you can work on together and other ways that you can bring value to their business.

So it's really something that isn't optional. You have to cater things to your client's needs. 

Galen Low: I love that. It's not just that tell, but also a listen, right? In order to be an enablement office, in order to be a group that empowers people to do that. 

I'm actually curious because that brings me back around to the education piece and Bruno, you touched on it a little bit. I think we've all kind of touched on it a little bit about the idea that, yes, it's not just, holding all the templates and, doling them out when asked, but also like educating others within the organization to understand why projects are valuable, how projects work, why things are the way they are.

Have any of you seen some good examples of what that education looks like, maybe using AI, maybe just like your standard training, but have you seen PMOs and other equivalents do to help educate and train maybe non project managers to understand projects better?

Olivia Montgomery: So a big part of my latest study on this found that one of the most impactful ways. So I did a study that was a group of PMs that have formal PMOs at their office.

And I asked them all the same questions and I wanted to compare and gauge, okay what kind of success, what kind of challenges, how do they compare against each other? Even an informal PMO was found to have considerable impact. On they had less fewer delays in projects, they came in more on budget and more on time and they did meet stakeholder expectations better, even informal.

So that's even if you're just like a really good. You're a small team. Maybe you're 1 good person. That's good at the portfolio strategy management side. Even informal helps quite a lot. The top way that they're driving that help is clarity of roles and responsibilities. And that's across the board, not just project managers.

That's everybody in the company, ideally, understands what everybody's roles and responsibilities. It could just a simple clarity of what's a product manager versus a scrum master versus a project manager. If we're not speaking the same language and we're not using the same dictionary, Things get really tough, and you spend a lot of time spinning your wheels and not really understanding each other.

So a PMO can help build that dictionary to provide the clarity. And it's that people need to know clearly and transparently who has decision making authority, who doesn't, who's responsible for executing a task, who's responsible for validating, who sets the priority of what project goes first and what project gets canceled.

That clarity, just very basic, same dictionary, you. Using the same terms and understanding everybody's roles and responsibility, companies that have the PMOs, even informal, like I said, that do this, have double the success of projects. In my latest study, it's quite astounding. 

Galen Low: I love that clarity is the job. And in some ways, that clarity around, like, how are we all working together, not just as a project team, but as an organization is part of the purpose and is somewhat universal, I think, in terms of humans working together, for now. Humans and AI working together. 

Olivia Montgomery: I'm already telling PMs who are starting to work with AI to put AI on a racy chart, especially if they're doing something specific, even if it's something new or simple, like it's going to start making your status reports, even just starting to show this is your clear world, there's a lot of resistance, hesitancy and fear about PMs being automated out of a job, other people on the project being automated out of a job.

I think you can help quell that and Vox what AI is going to be doing, put in a RACI chart. 

Galen Low: I love that. I think that's such a great idea. I'm going to try that and see how many A's end up with AI on it. I guess maybe that kind of tilts us actually into the future. And I do want to have a futurist spin to this. And then we'll get to the questions because I see a lot of questions building up and I want to get to as many as we can. 

But let's put on our future hats a little bit because we're talking about AI. Bruno, you mentioned AI in the context of, a PMO and we've been talking about, Lauren, you've mentioned about like aligning to strategic objectives.

In a client context or in an enterprise context, it has to be like the delivery of that strategy. It's not just getting projects done. It's making sure projects are successful. And that's not the same thing. Bruno, like talk to me, we've had some conversations about, like strategy execution as being the PMO focus.

And if you were to look into the future of a human centered AI powered PMO, what shape does that take? What are some of its characteristics for you? 

Bruno Morgante: I think what they see there. It is companies that take an important decision about defining what success looks like because this is where we still have a big gap.

You still hear too many people talking about, Oh a project is successful if it is delivered on scope, on time, on budget, the famous iron triangle. It's true until a certain point. I always ask the question. So what's the point of delivering of perfectly delivering a project, which in the end it produces something which is absolutely not used by anyone.

What's the point? So do a step back, define success in a proper way and have the organization on the same page, not PMO saying a project needs to be delivered on scope, on time, on budget, while actually the organization wants. outcome benefits value out of that project. So bring them to that level. Then when you are there, it is definitely like you are playing a different game as a PMO.

You are definitely going to play a different game. How do I see it in future? There are all the things that I described, plus, of course, adding AI to the picture. It is going to help projects being more successful, which in the end, it is the reason why we are all doing what we do. We want them to be successful.

It is also helping organizations getting what they actually wanted out of their strategy, design the strategy, which until now, really too many companies are keeping the two things as so separated and they shouldn't. We are talking about the same. You have a beautiful strategy designed. How do we make it work?

Like you might spend months. I have examples of companies spending months, so many hours working on the strategy and then not talking about how do we make it happen? This is connected, AI can help, but AI can help something that is already working. If it is broken then you need to fix it before AI can help.

Galen Low: I love that. I love that sort of redefining like what project success is, which I think is happening but it's. It's a big hole to get out of in terms of how deeply project management has been simplified down to a triangle, which is still important, but maybe not the only thing, right? You could realize ROI long after the project is done, and it could be a success.

Olivia Montgomery: That reminds me, building off of that, one way to be flexible and adaptable in your project approach is to offer different tracks. That you can work with your senior leadership team, your executives, and your clients. Gather what everybody needs, what their thresholds are, what the key importance, what the success factors for the project is.

And then you can let that identify, fall into what kind of tracks you have. So maybe you have a project plan track. For money's not the most important, but getting it done on time is, and what they want specifically. So then you'll have a track that focuses on those priorities. You see this a lot with hybrid project models.

You'll have an executive team that wants to know exactly what the project's going to cost. When is it going to be done? They want that waterfall approach. I want to know when and how much and that's it. But sometimes within that, you can find the flexibility of, okay, but they're flexible of what the deliverables end up looking like.

What success looks like is a little more fluid. So you can have a track that supports that, and that's one reason why just one project plan, one project track, especially if it's just within the Iron Triangle, isn't helping anybody. So you can find out what the success metrics and everybody's thresholds are, and adapt and flex your project plan for that.

Galen Low: We're picturing like a sports playbook, right? It's okay, we're in this situation, needs this thing, right? Turn to page 21. Remember this? We practiced it. Let's go. Let's go. Oh, actually, we can't do that this time. Let's buttonhook this way. I'm using a sports term that I don't fully understand. 

Oh, Lauren, I'm... 

Lauren Selley: ...also over my head, sorry. 

Galen Low: Someone can correct your...

Lauren Selley: ...own adventure book. We don't even have to get into your own adventure book. 

Olivia Montgomery: I like that. 

Galen Low: Miss those. Dating ourselves. 

Lauren, I wanted to go into the sort of agency side of things there because You mentioned before about this tailoring aspect, right? And everything's some kind of hybrid Frankenstein's monster, but in a good way.

And I'm wondering, A do others around you, your clients and other folks at the agency, do they see your team as innovators? And also, as you're tailoring, like, how do you like bake those into choose your own adventure book later? 

Lauren Selley: I think there's so much opportunity. I'm going to be the person on here who's going to say a lot of people are afraid of AI.

I'm like, bring it on. Give me all of the tech. Give me all of the technology because I'm not afraid of it. I love being able to incorporate it in the day to be able to take away the admin, to be able to take away the mundane and focus on more of the strategic pieces of things than the tactical decisions.

Now, listen, I am just like everyone else. I'm sick of the buzzword, right? I don't need to log on to LinkedIn or everything else. And AI has to be every single post, but at the same time, it's not going away. Clients want AI driven solutions. We want to utilize an outside of AI, right? Just innovative technology to help us be more efficient.

Automating things is so key. You see this in so many different top software options for project managers. They flaunt constantly their automation capabilities, their integration capabilities. Workflows to handle things like budgeting and reporting and getting much better resource management. I also love utilizing technology like that to help with leaning back on what we were saying earlier, training and education.

There is this ability to instead of using this approach from back when we were young and in school and just assuming everyone has the same learning style. This is something I take to content creation as well. You don't have to just say, here's a training or here's a video, watch it, we expect you to retain it, we expect you to be able to deliver all of these results for a client.

You can use these types of technologies to cater something to a topic that a person really likes hearing about, create unique analogies. I created an entire series about how project management concepts relate to Taylor Swift's era tour, but I wouldn't be able to think of all of those myself because I haven't even listened to half of the albums.

These are things that we have the advantage of being able to use to help people learn these skills faster and help our clients learn. Get more out of their engagement time with us because we don't have to get so bogged down and all the mundane reporting. So I say, bring it on. Take the admin stuff out of my life.

I don't like scheduling meetings anyway. I don't like taking meeting minutes. Anyway, let me focus on the more strategic decisions I'm happy. 

Galen Low: I love that. And there's like that opportunity and opportunity risk as well of Oh, it's getting taken off my plate so I can do more admin instead of actually going, okay, the hard pivot is actually to be like, how can we get to the table on strategy because we might not be there right now.

Nobody sees us as innovators. Everyone thinks that we are, like the robotic standardization police. But we're not, we're actually innovating every day, because every project's a little bit different, and we hit chaos, and we actually need to do something a little bit differently. And I was going somewhere with that, but I've completely lost my train of thought.

But, I do love this notion of, okay, don't use your extra time leverage AI to do something more strategic and, valuable to an organization to help it achieve its goals and get in there, understand it, understand those goals and wave that flag of, that is what you're doing.

I guess it's funny because it leads me down a path and then I'll like, I'll take it to the Q and a probably after this, the interesting path is we had talked about AI, the system fears in any profession. Will it take my job? Equally, we have the informal PM. Like I opened this up and I said a lot of projects are getting run by people who aren't project managers, who never thought of themselves as project managers, who've never been trained as project managers.

And then we have a PMO of innovation and collaboration, a human centered, empathetic, flexible, adaptable, dynamic, agile PMO that's going to help people deliver projects. And I'm like, wait a minute, isn't that two strikes against the PM profession where suddenly we're going to empower non PMs? We're fine, we love you non PMs, by the way.

Are we going to empower them to deliver projects? And what happens to the actual project managers? And then, is AI going to then come in and also fill in the gaps, and does that mean the end of the project manager? And the PMO kind of lives on, but the PM doesn't? I don't know. It's an outrageous thought, but I thought maybe I would get an opinion.

Bruno, what do you think? PMs, not in danger or in danger? 

Bruno Morgante: Not in danger at all. Not in danger at all. There will definitely be more and more need of project managers in the next years. We definitely need the PMs. If they haven't done it yet to start looking at things with different angle. And they think the focus on communication being very effective and have a proper communication plus being adaptable, moving away from, this is what I read when I was taking my certification 15 years ago.

It is different. The world around us has changed, and it's going to drastically change over the next few years. PMs will to be successful, they have to master those elements, but there will always be need for PMs. Absolutely. More and more companies will move into the approach of projects versus operations.

We will need PMs. We definitely need PMs. AI is going to help project managers to be more successful. And actually, as Lauren said, it will help taking away a lot of the boring admin stuff, which nobody likes. And it's going to do it for you, do it better, and potentially also to help you gaining some insights from this boring stuff.

Again, I always take the easy example of lessons learned. We do them since ever, and no one is reading them. What if AI is going to do it for you, summarize it. And when you start your new project, you already have the summary of all of that. Then of course, if you don't follow that's your choice, but that is definitely going to be a big added value for a project manager.

Galen Low: Love that. A mission briefing. Not like a. 

Olivia Montgomery: I see Matthew in the chat pointed out a good thing too. A good aspect of the PM is also going to make clients happy. Nobody's going to want to just work with software. Nobody's going to want to be like, hey, where's this effort at? Let me check a dashboard.

Nerds like us do that. But that's just not what a client's going to do. And that's not what executives are going to do. There's always going to be people that want to talk to a human. We're seeing that like in the US right now, they just want to be like, if you're called customer service. They want like one button and you can start talking to a human.

That's very new, but that's showing that's how people want to operate. So yeah, you're not going to be able to just be like, all right, let me get the automated service of this project management. No, you're going to always want to hit a button and talk to a person. That person needs to know the project.

And I don't know how that could be anybody other than a project manager by whatever job title you want to give them. 

Galen Low: I love that for the like, communication, clarity, interfacing, the listening portion, the humanity. 

Lauren Selley: I couldn't agree more. I echo everything that everyone says, but there's So much that comes down to the historic know, and I know that you can train data sets and things from historic projects and the lessons learned, but truly the what you're taking away from it and what you're learning and adapting the number 1 thing that I feel like.

PMs have a hard time understanding their career growth path. Think of it this way, a junior PM or a project coordinator, they have this list of roles and responsibilities and they go down it and they go, boss, I check all of these boxes. I can do this. I can do this. I can do this. I can do this. I should be a senior project manager.

I should be a program manager. And the boss goes, I get that, but you just don't have enough experience. What does that mean? What does that mean? They're like, I don't have enough experience. Look, I can do it all. I can do every single one of these things. What you can't do is anticipate risk yet based on previous projects, previous learnings and what, goes wrong every time or what, and anticipate the client's going to say.

There's so much nuance that comes to the knowledge that you've retained from running these things in the past from the way that, teams operate and interface with each other, especially when you run global teams like I do the things between India or Europe and the Philippines and South America and Latin America.

We have all of the. Various cultures and the nuance that comes into that too, and all of that can't be automated. It's an amazing tool to have technology, AI, everything helping you with all of the mundane, but PM's here to stay. We're people, and that role is going to exist. 

Galen Low: I love that. Nuance and people.

My last question actually was like, So what do we think? Should the future be the PMO show? Or should it go the way of the dodo? And I think a resounding PMO is here to stay. It can be an innovation hub. We need to keep it human. We need to use AI to our advantage. And we need to drive strategy more than we need to focus only on an iron triangle. And I think there's some, like, how questions now. This is why I wanted to get into them. Because okay. But how? 

So I've got a question over here from Matthew. Question is, how can small agencies instill a PMO when funding is typically lacking, leadership buy in is challenging, and the experience of people promoted into the position just don't have the training, and also the agency isn't able to train them up?

Where does one start? I might throw that to Lauren first. 

Lauren Selley: I have an answer, but I can't tell you that you're going to like it. And the answer is going to be do it anyway. You do it anyway, and it's not uncommon to see this be an answer to how you prove the value of something start showing results. It's the same way that you get promoted in a job.

Do the next role above you show that you can handle that capability, start optimizing process, show how you've made an impact in the way that things are working and show how you believe that you could make more impact, create that business case. Put the why behind it. The value of the PMO again is coming back to being able to support these bigger organizational goals.

And if we can get people away from the stigma of the name and think about it more as a group that is truly trying to help the organization meet their goals. Then executives and leadership start to see it as profitability, efficiency, ways to actually make money versus spend money on operations, but it's hard to get them there and you have to prove it first.

So do it. Anyway, I'll add 1 tiny extra piece. Do it, but collaborate because. To the point that Olivia made earlier, everyone has a different level of exposure that they experience in an organization. Some people are zoomed way out and they're focused on these big picture goals and they have no idea what's going down on the tactical ground.

That's when you see people who are doing the day to day execution so angry at management because it's like, how far removed can you be? Then you have the people that are so tactical that they're constantly like, this stings. This doesn't work. We need to fix this. And they don't have any idea what the bigger problems are that the organization is trying to face.

You only solve these problems when you work together and bring together these different mindsets and different levels, so do it, but collaborate. Don't work in a silo. 

Galen Low: Love it. Yeah, it's the isolation that's created those negative stereotypes in the first place. Another question here, and I think we touched on it here, but I wanted to expand on it.

The question is is there a certain size of agency, or I'm going to open it up and say, or any organization, that should or should not consider having a PMO? I'm wondering, Bruno, if you have any thoughts on that? 

Bruno Morgante: I don't have a number of projects or a size of projects in mind, but definitely there is there might be like if you're, if your company is doing two, three projects, 10 projects, you probably don't need that.

You don't need that type of structure. Unless those are big, important projects, then it might be the case in general. I am pro structure, pro PMOs, as you can imagine, but I am the first one saying it really depends from from your reality. And sometimes. It happens to me when I speak with small startups and I ask them, what is a project for you?

And I start the conversation from that discussion. And sometimes it's not really a project. They have something else going on and they think that they refer to it as a project, but it is not. But then again, think about if the organization decides for whatever reason to implement a project management office, it doesn't have to be 25 people PMO, it could be a 1 person PMO, a 2, 3 people PMO.

It depends. It really depends from the approach and what we want to achieve. 

Olivia Montgomery: Yeah, I would say 1 thing you could look for is if there's competing priorities, which. There almost always are competing priorities, so yeah, once you've hit a certain level of maybe it's a dollar amount and you want to keep an eye on that, investment where it's going, but in general, ideally, you want the PMO to be positioned in the most neutral position possible within the company, so that they're not, they don't have to adhere to, they don't only report to the CTO or CIO, or they only report to operations, you would like them placed in the most neutral place possible.

And so anytime you have opposing ideas, operations wants this, HR wants this, IT needs this, that's definitely where you need a PMO to help manage and be that neutral space. Because if you don't create a neutral space, everybody's going to take their sides and take their departments and their own motivations and just clash. So you need that neutral ground and a PMO creates that. 

Galen Low: Oh, that sort of mediator of conflicting interests. I really like this next question from one of our members here. It was very much a how question. I think it's a good one because we haven't really talked about it. 

The question is what recommendations do you have to help shift your team's mindset, your PM team's mindset from processes and best practices being presented as robotic and mandated towards like a framework of supporting the why, like we talked about what does, what is the way that you can get your PMs to like embody this mindset and reflect it into your organization to start the shift?

Lauren Selley: I can take that. It's. I don't mean to oversimplify it, but if you've heard of the five why's, it is there for a reason. You ask why that needs to exist. You ask why that is a challenge. And then you try to understand the underlying issues behind that and understand why those are happening. So many people are so quick to prescribe what they think needs to change without truly getting to the root cause.

Of what the underlying issues are, right? So really trying to distill the challenges saying something is a problem. People are burnt out. We need to fix that. That's a real hard problem to fix. If you don't understand why people are burned out. We ask them to work too many hours. Why?

Our projects are overestimate or underestimated and we don't have enough time. Why is that happening? Okay. When we estimate, we normally get handed off something from the sales team that doesn't have enough. How is that happening? You have to really get to the root. To understand the downstream effects.

And once you understand that, you really can eliminate so many things with one salt, right? There's so many downstream challenges that can come from one problem, but often people only see that bigger issue at the end. So you just have to dig in and keep getting to the root cause of it. 

Bruno Morgante: If I can add a bit, the same approach works very well.

Also, when in you are running a PMO and you start seeing project managers that are somehow not willing to follow your directions, that's the same. Ask the why. Ask why is that why you don't want to? Produce your project status report at the end of the week. And you frequently are going to realize it's not because the PM is lazy, but it's just because if they tell the truth, maybe a manager is going to finger pointing at them and say you PM are not doing the job.

Or because whatever they write, nobody's reading the report. So then the problem is not the PM is not doing the status report. The problem is much bigger is the organization is not ready to have that type of conversation. And you can take that and bring it to the right table. Having the discussion to the right table.

Galen Low: I'm going to conflate two questions here because, we've been talking about project managers. I have a project manager bias. 

But the question I'm going to conflate is, do the panelists think that a PMO is more of an operations role, or more of a senior PM slash director role? And also, to conflate a question with another one, can we talk about some of the non PM roles, the administrative support that supports a PMO, and what kind of skill set or mindset they should have?

Lauren Selley: The first question, or the first part of the question, I don't think that, again, we touched on this a little bit before, but I don't think that you would say this is a director role or a head of PM role. It has to be a collaborative effort between everyone in all parts of the organization and in multiple departments.

I don't even know if we've talked about that necessarily, but this is cross functional. If only project managers are the ones trying to solution for these things, but they're solutioning them. For things that impact other departments, that's a quick way to get a lot of people to hate you. That's the reason why we have this allergic reaction to process because you hear a bunch of project managers get in a room together and then they go.

Oh, the entire company, this is the way we deliver projects now and you over here that had no input into this. That's how you have to do it, too. They might have a completely different perspective. So don't think it's a title thing. Collaborative to the core. Sometimes the title makes a difference in who has the authority to start it or to approve time or to approve budget that can go and be allocated towards it, but certainly not who should be participating only and who should be making the decisions in a silo.

So that's the first part. 

Olivia Montgomery: Yeah, I think you should try and identify The skill sets and the traits that you need, who is always asking, challenging the status quo, who's digging deeper, who gets people to open up and talk transparently and honestly, who's able to, do that. That's key. And that can be anybody, whether they need to be put into a different role based on like your organization's culture.

That's going to be case by case, but try to identify those traits. Okay. Dynamic thinking problem solving always challenging and trying to iterate and prioritize and let ruthless prioritization mindset. Find those people and amplify their voices and have them drive and be like the pivot point for the collaboration, because, like I said, they're the ones that people open up to.

Lean into that. Have them keep doing it because you need to be collaborative.

Galen Low: All right folks, there you have it. As always, if you'd like to join the conversation with over a thousand like-minded project management champions, come join our collective. Head on over to thedigitalprojectmanager.com/membership to learn more. And if you like what you heard today, please subscribe and stay in touch at thedigitalprojectmanager.com. Until next time, thanks for listening.