The New Role of the PMO in a Disrupted World

About this webinar

Budget cuts and reorganisations force leadership to decide what can still be supported, while AI is changing where PMO effort adds value. Laura Barnard frames the stakes with a simple test: if your PMO disappeared tomorrow, would leadership lose reporting, or lose strategic decision-making capability?

Laura, Rebecca Reynolds, Dr Al Zeitoun, Mickey Nakamura and Stuart Easton explore what it takes for a PMO to help leaders make business decisions by connecting strategic goals with capacity, value, options and consequences. Al sums up the opportunity as clarity, capacity and choices.

What you’ll hear

• Help make business decisions, not just report on projects. Laura argues that cuts can trace back to bets made without the PMO involved, and makes the case for giving leaders what they need to choose before work starts, not reports afterwards.
• Change the behaviour, not just the name. Laura warns that renaming a PMO without changing how it thinks, talks and works leaves the underlying problem in place.
• Make capacity visible. Rebecca and Al focus on making real capacity and constraints visible so leadership can see what the organisation can realistically support.
• Translate across the organisation. Mickey describes the PMO as a translator between leadership, middle management and delivery teams, while Al urges PMOs to speak in business outcomes rather than project terminology.
• Treat budget pressure as a portfolio choice. Stuart uses a duck-farm analogy: when feed runs short, spreading less across every duck means fewer eggs. Leadership may need to decide which work to keep supporting and which to stop.
• Treat AI as a change in where PMO effort goes. Al expects much of what PMOs are comfortable doing to be automated. Rebecca sees AI freeing the PMO for advising and enterprise thinking, while Mickey describes his PMO gaining a role in AI governance and rollout.

Mickey describes a merger of three organisations with no PMO in place. His team introduced what he describes as a PMO or transformation office, put about 1,100 projects and programmes through a stage gate and became what he calls an enablement office. He describes its role as driving value and cost savings rather than layoffs.

Rebecca Reynolds describes TransparentChoice as helping her make decision processes broad, inclusive and transparent, while Laura Barnard discusses how clients and students use it to start the executive conversations the panel is advocating.