The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - What Should a Good PMO Actually Do?

Episode Date: August 28, 2026

What should a good Project Management Office actually do?A PMO can create standards, dashboards, governance, meetings, and reporting, but those are tools, not outcomes.In this episode of People, Process, Progress, Kevin Pannell explores three outcomes a good PMO should help create: Visibility, Predictability, and Confidence.Drawing from a recent PMI Southwest Virginia presentation, Kevin connects practical project and portfolio management to concepts including the Common Operating Picture, PACE planning, John Boyd’s OODA loop, PMO pit crews, project guardrails, and governance as a safety rail rather than red tape.The episode comes back to three questions every PMO and project organization can ask:Can we see the body of work?Do we know what happens next?Do we trust our ability to execute?Because good project management isn’t about adding process for the sake of process. It’s about helping people execute important work.People. Process. Progress.Leadership • Project Management • Execution

If we surveyed the people your PMO supports today, what would they say? Would they describe your PMO as a delivery engine that helps them get important work done? Or would they describe it as a governance barrier they have to work through to get things done? I recently put that question in front of my PMI chapter here in Southwest Virginia during a presentation on developing PMO standards. But as we worked through the presentation, I think the bigger question became, what should a good PMO actually do? I'm Kevin Pinell, and this is People, process progress, leadership, project management, and execution. As I shared in the intro, I recently had the opportunity to present developing PMO standards, building visibility, predictability, and

confidence to the PMI Southwest Virginia chapter. When you hear PMO standards, you might immediately think about templates, process, governance, status reports, maybe some giant methodology document nobody wants to read, but that wasn't really the point of the presentation, because none of those things are outcomes. A template is a tool, a meeting is a tool, a dashboard as a tool, governance, you guess it, is a tool. The real question is, what does the tool help us accomplish? That was really the conversation. The framework I used was pretty simple. We looked at the work through the lens of drum roll, people, process, progress. And we looked for three outcomes, visibility, predictability, and confidence.

So rather than walk you through a presentation slide by slide, I wanted to pull some principles out when some of these ideas came from and how I learned to think about them in practice. Here's the central idea. A good PMO should make it easier for an organization to see its work, understand how that work moves, and trust its ability to execute.

That's the visibility, predictability, confidence stuff. standards should support those outcomes. They shouldn't exist for their own sake. So let's start with visibility. One of the concepts I've carried from emergency management into portfolio management is the common operating picture or cop. In an incident, you hack, you can have operations, planning logistics, command, public information, outside agencies, and a lot of other people working different parts of the same problem. They don't only need every piece of information. But they need enough shared information to understand the situation and make core.

decisions. I think about a project portfolio the same way. Leaders don't necessarily need every task. A project manager doesn't necessarily need every execution detail, but we need a shared picture of reality. What's active, what's coming, what's at risk, what's changing. Where are the dependencies? Where are we competing for the same resources? The tool isn't the point. Shared awareness is the point. Your common operating picture could be a sophisticated real-time dashboard. It could be a roadmap. It could be a shared go-live calendar. It could be a spreadsheet. I care a lot less about the tool than whether people can actually see and understand the work. The next key visibility piece is data-supported decisions. We've all seen that version of a crime show, right, where somebody's looking

at a giant image and says, enhance, suddenly we're zooming into the important detail. I think good portfolio reporting should work similarly. Start with the cop, then enhance to the level necessary for the decision we're trying to make. An executive may need the portfolio view. A governance group may need project health, risk, decisions, and dependencies. The project team is going to need the schedule details. We don't need to give everybody everything, give people the level of visibility they need to make decisions in front of them. Next is finding your guardrails. Before we start creating standards, we also need to understand the boundaries. What's actually required? What's policy? What's regulatory, what's leadership expectation, what's a contractual obligation? What do you own and what don't

you own? And where are the gray areas? I think about this as exterior structure with interior design. Somebody gives you the external frame of a house. You don't get to decide that the exterior wall shouldn't exist. That's a guardrail. But inside that structure, there may be a lot of freedom to design how the space works. Don't create rules for things that only need boundaries. Find the guardrails. Then give competent people room to work inside them. So, visibility answers. Can we see and understand the work? Once we can see it, the next question is,

do we know how the work moves? That's predictability. And predictability doesn't mean pretending everything is going to go according to plan. And as we get into predictability, we have to expect stormy projects, guys. One of the primary planning constructs that I like is pace or primary alternate contingency and emergency planning. What's the primary plan?

And if that becomes unavailable, what's the alternate? If conditions keep deteriorating, what's our contingency? And if we truly in trouble, what's the emergency option? Projects have supply problems. People leave. Technology doesn't behave the way we expected. Dependency slip. Priorities change.

Expect stormy project skies. That doesn't mean to assume the project will fail. It means don't be surprised that something eventually won't go according to plan. And good planning gives us options. Planning is everything. We sometimes become too attached to the plan, but the real value often came from the planning. When we planned, we learned the dependencies. We identified resources.

We talked about risk. We challenged assumptions. We figured out who needed to make the decisions. So when reality changes, the planning were already done gives us context for what to do next, which leads directly into another framework. Uda. Observe, orient, decide, act. U.S. Air Force Colonel John Byrd developed the concept we now know as the Uda Loop.

Something changes. First observe what's happening. Then orient yourself to what information means in your environment. Make a decision and then act. And then observe again because your action just changed the environment. And that's why it's a loop. Planning prepares us. Uda helps us adapt. That's project execution, right? We're not throwing away the plan every time something changes. We're also not blindly following yesterday's plan when today's reality is telling us something different. Build PMO pit crews. Think about a racing pit crew. The objective isn't for one person to demonstrate how good they are at changing a tire. The objective is getting the car back on the track safely and quickly. Everybody has a role. Everybody understands the larger outcome and they work

together to remove friction. That's how I like to think of about a PMO team. Project Manager shouldn't disappear into individual projects and operate as islands, get together regularly, what's happening, what's coming, where are you stuck, what are you seeing that might affect someone else who needs help? The portfolio is a team sport. The meeting isn't the outcome, removing friction is. Pizza and port-a-jones. This one usually gets a laugh when I put it on a slide, pizza and port-a-jones, but there's a real point underneath it. I was a state emergency response officer and I showed up and some of my incident management teammates showed up and we looked around and we saw folks who had been fighting a big fire all night long who'd been outside who hadn't eaten

for a while and then we needed to help the locality track them to make sure we knew where they were they were safe we could bring them in and we had all these fancy tools and a trailer full of equipment and signs and all this cool incident management stuff and we realize they're hungry they have to go to the bathroom and we're going to track them on this board started with a white board, then we use something else. But that's where pizza and port-a-johns came from, is figure out what people really need and don't let sophisticated project management make you forget your basic project needs. The project manager can change. The experience shouldn't. This is predictability at its finest, right? Think about organizations you trust as a customer. The individual person

hoping you may change, their personality may change, their style may change, but you still understand how the experience works. The thing that comes to mind for me is Chick-fil-A, right? It's always friendly, they're efficient, and always tasty. That's the distinction between consistency and sameness. I want project managers to have their own personalities, their own strategies, their own ways of building relationships. I don't want clones, but stakeholders shouldn't have to learn how project management works every time they get a different PM. How do we start? How do we communicate? How do we escalate? How do we handwork into operations? There should be some, consistency around those moments, right? Standardize the experience without standardizing the human

being. That's people. Governance is a safety rail. Think about an actual guardrail along a highway, right? Its purpose isn't to steer your car. You still drive, you still choose your lane, you make thousands of small decisions. The guardrail exists because beyond a certain boundary, the consequences become unacceptable. That's how I think useful governance should operate. identify the non-negotiables, make them clear, explain why they exist, then give people room to operate. Governance should be a safety rail, not red tape. Right, if governance is primarily preventing competent people from doing their work, we should probably examine what we've built. Are we still aligned? Project being approved doesn't mean it deserves resources forever.

Organizations change, strategies change, resources change, the environment changes. So, periodically, ask, are we still aligned? Are we still solving the right problem? Are we still producing the value we expected? Is this still worth doing? Do we continue? Adapt? Pause. Stopping work that no longer makes sense can be progress. Portfolio management isn't about keeping every project alive, right? It's about helping the organization invest finite resources in work that still matters. Now, let's make this practical. You don't need to build. a new PMO maturity model tomorrow. You don't need another 50 question assessment. Get your team together and ask three questions. Can we see the body of work? That's visibility. Do we know what happens next?

That's predictability. Do we trust our ability to execute? That's confidence. And here's the important part. Pay attention to where people hesitate. If everyone immediately says yes to the first question but starts qualifying or qualifying the second, there's your conversation. If you have excellent visibility and predictability, but stakeholders don't trust the process, there's your conversation. Don't start with what process should we add. Start with what outcomes are we missing. Then add the minimum amount of structure necessary to improve it. So what should a good PMO actually do? Standards matter, governance matters, dashboards matter, planning matters, but none of them are the point. The point is helping people execute important work. People process progress. And if we're doing that well,

I think we should see the results in three places. Greater visibility, better predictability, more confidence. That's people process progress. If this helped you lead or execute a little better, follow the show so you don't miss the next episode. Go to peopleprocessprogress.com, follow and read more of the articles. You can also follow me on social media, the Kevin Pennell, on X. Instagram and I have a YouTube channel where I focus more on health, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu and life, less project management stuff, but very helpful because as project managers, we should stay active. So until next time, keep taking care of your people, improving your processes, and making progress. Godspeed, don't.