The PMO Under Review
You lead a nine-person enterprise PMO at a retail bank. A new COO, formerly an external consultant, has commissioned a benchmark review and told the executive committee that 'mature organisations run lean PMOs'. The PMO costs €1.4m a year and oversees a portfolio of 55 projects and €180m. The numbers are not flattering: 30% of projects meet their original business case, and two major programmes are nine months late. Your counter-evidence is real but awkward - four gate reviews in the last year stopped or re-scoped projects worth roughly €22m in committed spend, and three of the six recovering projects were flagged by the PMO before the business noticed. The COO's preferred option is to cut the PMO by 50% and move reporting to Finance. A decision is expected in ten weeks.
1. What value proposition should you put in front of the COO, and what evidence would you use?
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Defending the PMO on headcount is the losing move; the COO has already framed the question as 'how lean'. Reframe it as 'what risk does each function remove, and what is it worth'.
Build the case around the €22m. Four stopped or re-scoped projects is the single most persuasive number available, because it is a decision outcome with a date, a document and a named sponsor. Present each one as: what the PMO saw, when, what decision followed, what was avoided. Avoided spend is contestable - flag the assumption openly and let Finance challenge it rather than being caught inflating.
Be honest about the 30%. A PMO that presents only successes gets discounted entirely. Explain the driver: if business cases are written by sponsors and never revisited, the PMO's gate process is the only place they can fail. That converts a bad statistic into an argument for strengthening the gate, not removing it.
Separate what the PMO does from what it produces. Reporting is 40% of your effort and the easiest thing to move to Finance; assurance, prioritisation and recovery are the parts that produced the €22m. Offer the first, defend the second.
Quantify the counterfactual risk of the COO's option. If reporting moves to Finance and assurance is cut, who flags the next failing programme - and what is the expected loss at the current 30% benefit-realisation rate on a €180m portfolio? Ask Finance to model it jointly; a number the COO's own function produced is worth more than yours.
2. What restructuring options would you put forward, and which do you recommend?
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Four credible shapes:
A. Lean delivery support. Keep 3–4 staff, focus on scheduling and reporting support for the largest programmes. Cheapest, but abandons independent assurance and portfolio prioritisation. B. Assurance office. Retain gate reviews, health checks and portfolio prioritisation; divest reporting and tooling to Finance and delivery. Small, senior, high credibility. C. Centre of excellence. Methods, competence development and coaching, with delivery standards delegated. Attractive in theory, but in a bank with 30% benefit realisation it addresses the wrong problem. D. Disband. Distribute staff to business units. The COO's implicit alternative; removes independence, which is precisely what produced the early warnings.
Recommendation: B, at five to six staff. It aligns with the evidence - the value came from decisions, not from volume of reporting - and it concedes the headcount argument in a way the COO can claim as a win. Propose that routine reporting transfers to Finance within one quarter, with the PMO retaining data definitions so that the numbers do not diverge.
Make the real trade-off explicit. Option B deliberately stops doing project-level status chasing and portfolio-wide methodology support. Say so, because a PMO that claims to shrink while keeping every activity will be disbelieved - and because naming what you will stop is the strongest evidence that the proposal is a genuine redesign rather than a defence.
3. How do you manage the political dimension over the ten weeks, given that the COO has already stated a preference publicly?
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A public preference creates a face-saving problem: the COO cannot simply reverse without looking indecisive, so the objective is to give them a decision they can own, not to win an argument.
Pre-brief before the formal review. Meet the COO one-to-one in week one with two questions, not a defence: what outcome from the PMO would make the cut defensible, and which of your current activities would they personally drop. Positions stated in a committee are harder to move than questions asked in private.
Recruit Finance early. They are the likely beneficiary of the reporting transfer and therefore a natural ally: if Finance confirms the data definitions must stay with the PMO, the COO's option becomes visibly more complex than it looked in the committee room.
Let the COO sponsor the review. Offer to run the assessment to their terms of reference, with an external benchmarker if budget allows. A review you execute is one you can shape, and it denies the narrative that the PMO is resisting scrutiny.
Protect the sponsors of the €22m decisions. Those sponsors are the people whose projects were stopped; they can testify to value in a way the PMO cannot. Ask two of them to speak at the decision meeting - but only if they volunteer.
Prepare a dignified fallback. Know which staff you would redeploy and which two you would fight to retain. A PMO lead who has a plan for being halved is harder to dismiss than one who has only a plan for surviving intact.