From Project Police to Strategic Partner: How PMOs Become the Value Engine that Leaders Respect

About this webinar

An organisation ranked 800 projects. All 800 were still running. Stijn Janssens uses the example to show why a priority list is not the same as a decision about what should proceed. Together with Alexander David and TransparentChoice's Dan Dures and Stuart Easton, he explores the harder challenge: helping leaders decide what to support, delay or stop, without becoming the project police.

Even value is not a simple answer. Alexander looks at financial performance; Stijn points to public-service outcomes. Alexander also turns the question back on the PMO itself: how quickly an idea becomes a started project, whether governance matches the work, and whether reporting actually helps.

• Value first. Then deliverability. Alexander asks which investments deserve support before checking whether the skills and capacity exist. His run/grow/transform categories distinguish essential operations from change and innovation.
• Two portfolios, one team. Stijn warns that portfolios sharing the same people cannot be prioritised independently. Stuart adds the step many organisations skip: deciding how much funding and capacity each portfolio should receive.
• Find the problem before adding controls. Changing the PMO operating model means diagnosing the real problems, training people and co-designing processes, not simply buying another tool or adding another governance layer.
• Be willing to say no. Alexander describes zombie projects that still consume time even though nobody can explain their value. Stopping work also means confronting competing executive objectives and making difficult trade-offs feel fair.

And here is the catch: executives need concise insights they can act on, but the PMO needs delivery teams to trust it enough to speak openly. If it acts as police, leadership may hear that everything is possible when the teams doing the work know it is not.