How does your PMO work? As a Project Management Office leader, or someone setting up a PMO, you need to know where the PMO sits in the company, how it’s organized, and what services it offers. This is your operating model.
How does your PMO work? As a Project Management Office leader, or someone setting up a PMO, you need to know where the PMO sits in the company, how it’s organized, and what services it offers. This is your operating model.
An operating model is different from your staffing model (you could have full-time, part-time or a fractional PMO team). And it’s different from maturity level, which is more about how good your capabilities are. A centralized PMO can be immature; a federated PMO can be highly capable.
So what we’re talking about here is how you are setting up your PMO. Your operating model answers this question: “How is the PMO structured and what does it do?” And by the end of this article, you’ll know what your main options are and how to decide which is for you.
Definition: A single PMO function serving the whole organization or portfolio.
The good thing about having a centralized PMO is that you can get consistency, and a single source of truth for the whole portfolio. As the people who lead on all this stuff, you can mandate what you want, standardize what you want and support the whole organization.
It’s also a lot easier to build deep capability, because you control it all and can support project managers to reach your standards with coaching, templates, training and mentoring.
In context
- Topic: Proyectos, PMO y Riesgos — Gestión de proyectos, oficinas de proyecto y riesgo del portafolio.
- Source: Rebel's Guide to PM
- Published: 08/10/2026
Continue reading at the original source →
Excerpt published automatically by the site radar. The full text belongs to its publisher and is linked above.
Why it matters
Projects rarely fail on the day they are declared failed. They fail months earlier, in a meeting where somebody saw the problem coming and calculated it was not in their interest to say so. Everything else — the slipping schedule, the stretching budget — is the visible consequence of that silence.
My filter is the quality of the status report. If every project is green, the reporting system is not working: in any real portfolio some initiatives are in trouble, and a healthy organisation surfaces them in time rather than discovering them at the closure committee.
What usually goes wrong
The classic mistake is treating risk management as a deliverable of the planning phase. The matrix gets built, approved, filed. Nobody opens it again until closure, when it serves to document that the risk was foreseen — which is exactly the opposite of managing it.
What to watch
- The size of the first useful delivery: the further out it is, the more it resembles a bet.
- How it was estimated and how close the same organisation's previous estimates turned out to be.
- Who the sponsor is and how often they actually show up — not on the org chart, in the calendar.
How I read this entry
The way I would bring this down to earth is by shrinking the size of the deliveries. An eighteen-month project with nothing visible before month twelve is a bet, not a plan. I would rather have six deliveries that stand on their own, even if the total takes a little longer, because each one corrects the course.
This entry is an excerpt from the original source, selected by the site radar. The commentary above is the site's own and does not belong to the cited publisher.
Comments
No comments yet. Yours can be the first.
Living through this in your own team?
Open the chat and tell me how you're handling it. I'm interested in comparing notes.
