When Strategy Stalls – The PMO’s Role in Getting It Moving Again

About this webinar

Leadership says execution is failing. The PMO says priorities keep changing. What if both sides are missing something? Rebecca Reynolds and Stuart Easton challenge PMOs to work on the part of the strategy-execution gap they can influence, rather than wait for leadership to fix the relationship. They tackle the difficult "no", the PMO's place in executive decisions, and why information that makes perfect sense to a delivery team may mean very little to leadership.

What you'll hear

• Can you name leadership's top three priorities? Stuart asks this question of PMOs and finds that many struggle to answer. Rebecca challenges teams to examine their own assumptions before blaming executives for the disconnect. For PMOs without a seat at the table, she also suggests a practical route into leadership conversations: help establish the process through which priorities are evaluated and decisions made. The accompanying slides include questions to work through within your PMO and questions to take to leadership.
• Are priorities really changing, or just the projects getting attention? Stuart argues that strategic goals tend to be more durable than the apparent importance of individual projects. The churn often comes from never having assessed those projects against properly agreed strategic goals. Rebecca adds an important distinction: well-set criteria may stay relatively stable even when their weights change.
• How do you stop being the person who says "no"? Rebecca describes involving hundreds of people in developing prioritisation criteria for US federal-government work. Stuart explains how AHP and pairwise comparison can make leadership judgements more explicit. The point is not to remove difficult choices, but to give them a visible basis so the business owns "yes", "no" and "not yet", rather than leaving the PMO as the process police.
• Why wasn't the CIO invited into leadership conversations? Rebecca recalls a client whose CIO spoke almost entirely in technical terms, leaving executives unable to connect with what he was saying. The discussion explores how to replace project jargon and activity updates with explanations of business value, consequences and decisions leadership needs to make.
• What does a shower pass have to do with strategy? Rebecca describes a homeless shelter where persuading someone to accept and use a shower pass was meaningful progress. Its funder, meanwhile, wanted to measure self-sufficiency: people living in apartments with jobs. Rebecca shows why leadership needs to understand the starting reality, but also why the delivery organisation must explain how those first steps contribute to the ultimate goal.