Six Staff, Thirty Requests, One Bypass
Your PMO has six staff and supports 140 active projects across four business units. Intake runs at about 30 new requests a quarter against capacity for eight. The VP of Sales has twice gone directly to the CEO for approval of a customer-committed project, then asked the PMO to "assign a PM and get it started". Each time, a lower-priority internal project has slipped. Two of your six staff are fully occupied producing a 40-page monthly pack that three executives admit they skim. A regulator-driven compliance project is due in 11 weeks with no named business owner. Your sponsor, the COO, says the PMO "lacks teeth" and wants you to enforce the process.
1. How do you handle the VP of Sales this time, given the CEO has already approved?
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You do not refuse work the CEO has approved. A PMO cannot win a legitimacy fight against a CEO decision, and attempting it makes the PMO the obstacle rather than the control.
What you do instead is onboard it visibly. Register the project with dates and a PM, and attach an explicit displacement statement: "To staff X with a PM by 14 March, project Z moves from 30 April to 6 June. Owner of that consequence: [named executive]." Route the trade-off to the COO and the portfolio board, not to Sales, and not as a complaint - as the standard output of the portfolio view. That is the PMO doing its job, not defending its process.
Then use the incident as evidence for redesign. The pattern tells you something important: Sales can get a faster, more certain answer by going around than by going through. That is a design flaw in the intake, not a discipline problem in Sales. The fixes are to make the compliant route predictable (published turnaround on intake), and to add one gate where it matters commercially - customer commitments must enter the portfolio before the commitment is made, not after. Take that proposal to the COO with the two incidents as the case.
2. The COO wants enforcement. What actually changes behaviour here, and what would backfire?
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"Enforcement" is visible and satisfying, and the PMO has no authority to do it. Choosing that fight burns relationships with the business units and, on current evidence, the PMO would lose: two bypasses have already succeeded at CEO level.
What changes behaviour:
- Decision rights written down and signed. Which value and risk thresholds a business unit can approve without the PMO; which require the portfolio board. Most bypassing happens because nobody knows where the line is.
- Make the cost visible rather than punished. Every bypass appears in the portfolio view with its displacement attached. Over two quarters this creates its own pressure and shifts the conversation from rule-breaking to trade-offs.
- Be faster than the bypass. Publish an intake turnaround, hit it, and report your own performance against it. Speed is the only credible argument against a workaround.
- A very short list of non-negotiables agreed at CEO level - for example, regulatory work and customer commitments must be in the portfolio within five working days of decision.
What backfires: gate policing, refusing to staff approved work, escalating as a first move, and using a 40-page compliance report to shame sponsors. All three convert allies into people who route around you more carefully.
3. Where do you get the capacity to fix the 40-page pack and to resolve the compliance project's ownership?
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Both problems are solved from the same source: the pack.
Run a consumption audit on the 40 pages - who reads each section, what decision it drives, what happens if it is not sent. With three executives admitting they skim it, most of it will fail. Replace it with a one-page decision product plus accessible detail on request. That reclaims the two FTE currently formatting status, and it needs no new headcount, no business case and no approval. Do this first, because it gives you the capacity to absorb the next shock.
On the compliance project: the missing business owner is a governance gap, not a PMO task. The PMO cannot appoint an accountable executive, and pretending to own it hides the real risk. Escalate the specific facts to the COO - regulatory deadline in 11 weeks, no accountable business owner, named candidate proposed, decision needed by a date - and keep that escalation on the record.
If the only way to protect the date is for the PMO to supply the project manager, do that, but keep the accountability gap visible and unresolved in writing. Sequence matters: reclaim capacity from the pack first, then absorb the compliance project without dropping the portfolio view that makes the COO's decisions possible.