Operations vs. Innovation? Is Your PMO Ready for the Age of Value?
If you’ve been anywhere near the project world lately, or tuned in to Al and me on a Friday, you’ve probably heard it everywhere. From boardrooms to webinars, and yes even your favorite AI chatbot, welcome to what many are calling the Age of Value.
This is not about prettier reports or a new label on old decisions. It is a response to something deeper. A growing discomfort inside organisations. Teams are busy. Portfolios are packed. Yet leaders still struggle to answer the questions that really matter. Why does this work matter more than that work? What stops when something new starts?
We talk about value all the time. We decide on it far less often.
This tension between operations and innovation is exactly what Al Zeitoun and I explored in this episode of Project Management Mythbusters. Not as a theory, but as a practical question about how organisations actually run.
This is not about slapping “value” on a slide and calling it strategy. It reflects a real shift in how organisations operate. A shift from just keeping the lights on to changing the business while running it. That balance is difficult, but it is no longer optional.
Change today is constant, messy, and often driven by forces outside your control. When operations sit in one place and innovation in another, friction is inevitable. And friction slows everything.
The next generation finds this debate almost strange. Our brilliant friend Anara Asylbekova has even written a book teaching project management to children. Look at the questions they ask. They challenge assumptions early. They expect change to be normal. Strategic agility is not something they need to learn. It is something they grow up with.
What is driving this shift? A few forces are converging.
- Digitalization continues to remove repetitive work.
- Generative AI is changing how plans are created, compared, and adapted.
- The next generation of talent increasingly expects purpose, not just process.
We are no longer constrained by static plans and paper schedules. Today, tools like TransparentChoice allow teams to explore thousands of portfolio scenarios in seconds. You can see the impact of adding work, delaying it, or rebalancing capacity without guessing.
Technology alone, however, is not enough. If you do not match capability with mindset, if decisions remain implicit and trade offs stay unspoken, you simply automate old thinking at a faster pace.
So what do we do?
- First, stop treating operations and change as competing forces. They depend on each other. Your strategy needs to live in your portfolio, not in a document that gathers dust.
- Second, help teams focus on why work exists, not just how it is delivered. Impact matters more than activity. Al Zeitoun explores this deeply in his book on experience driven organisational culture.
- Third, give decision makers practical guidance. Our PMO Guide shares concrete ways to navigate constant change and evolve the role of the PMO with confidence.
What this means for your portfolio
If this all sounds reasonable but still feels hard to apply, that reaction is telling. Most portfolios do not fail because people lack intent or effort. They struggle because value decisions remain implicit, and trade offs never fully surface.
At this stage, adding another framework rarely creates clarity. What helps is stepping back and looking at how value, capacity, and change are actually interacting in your portfolio today.
That is the purpose of our briefing. It is a short, focused conversation with a senior advisor, designed to help you sense-check where friction is coming from and what typically resolves it.
No preparation. No portfolio data. No commitment. Just a practical discussion grounded in patterns we see across organisations facing the same tension between operations and innovation.
Book a Portfolio Briefing to get clarity before adding more work to an already full system.