The Impact Engine PMO

About this webinar

PMOs are often asked to fix late projects, overloaded teams, slow decisions and weak business outcomes. But what if the visible delivery problem is only a symptom of a decision made earlier?

In this session, Laura Barnard joins Stuart Easton to explore where a PMO can add value across the full journey from strategy definition, through execution, to business results. Laura challenges PMO leaders to look beyond templates, reporting and project controls, diagnose the root causes behind the problems leadership is experiencing, and focus their effort where it can make the greatest difference.

A central example traces apparently poor project delivery back through overloaded resources to a more fundamental problem: too many projects have been allowed to compete for the available capacity. That turns what first looks like a project-management or resource-management problem into a portfolio prioritisation and governance question.

What you’ll hear

• Diagnose the problem before fixing execution. Late projects and overloaded teams can be symptoms of upstream portfolio or strategy decisions rather than evidence that project execution itself is the root cause.
• Contribute before projects start. PMOs can help connect strategic priorities, portfolio choices, available capacity and clear success criteria before work enters delivery.
• Focus and stagger the work. Starting every approved project at once can spread scarce resources across too much work, while delaying starts until capacity is available can create greater focus.
• Simplify execution around decisions and outcomes. Processes, reports, meetings and tools should help people take action and make decisions rather than becoming an end in themselves.
• Define success in business terms. On-time, on-scope and on-budget measures do not by themselves show whether the organisation achieved the business result the initiative was meant to create.
• Look across the full strategy lifecycle. Laura frames the PMO’s potential contribution across Strategy Definition, Strategy Execution and Strategy Realization, with business outcomes rather than PMO activity as the end point.

The broader message is that project management is a means rather than the end. The PMO creates value when it helps leadership connect strategy to the work the organisation chooses, supports delivery, and keeps attention on the results that work is intended to produce.