The Project Management Office Maturity Index shows that the top 10% of PMOs do an exceptional job creating value for their organizations by setting the rules for change, aligning projects with strategy and staying flexible where it matters. If you want to know how they are able to that better than the other 90%, read on.
That does not come from me, it comes from higher up: The Project Management Institute (PMI) together with PwC surveyed more than 4000 project management professionals and identified a small gem of a group that is crucial in achieving twice the revenue and three times the customer satisfaction compared to the rest1. Who are they, you ask? They are the top 10% of Project Management Offices worldwide.
While most organizations run on change: new products, new systems, new regulations, new markets – they still treat projects as ad-hoc initiatives rather than managed investments. Some have implemented a PMO to bridge the gap between strategy on paper and results in the real world. And fewer still have continuously improved their PMO to reach an average project management office maturity of 94.9%. This is what you, too, should strive for, if you want to build an agile, value-driven and thus resilient organization.
Better to start with what a PMO does not do: add bureaucracy. Though a PMO will set the rules of the road for change, it does so by standardizing a few essential practices and developing people so they can deliver. Good PMOs are light, enabling, and close to business. They don’t run every project. They make every project run better.
The short answer: continuous improvement. The top 10% of PMOs excel where the rest stand still, resting in a blissful state of good enough. Instead of stopping there, they manage to consistently:
In other words, once established, the best PMOs continuously strive for excellence and actively seek out areas to improve. Not for improvements’ sake but strategically aligned with the goals for the whole organization. Only 38% of PMOs overall do that, while 94% of the top ten percent of PMO report that they ensure that “KPIs and initiatives are fully aligned with the wider organization’s strategic and change goals all the time” (my emphasis). The difference is similarly great when it comes to continuously adapting methods, software or processes to the different needs of teams or project types.
Source: PMI und PvC Global Survey on Transformation and Project Management 2021. © Image: InLoox GmbH
This begs the fair question of how do they do that? What enables them to outperform the other 90%? Success seems to rest on three pillars where the difference between the top 10% and the rest is the greatest:
If this still sounds too vague and unattainable, let me give you the following hands-on yet strategic moves forward.
1. Tie the PMO to strategy—and give it air cover.
The first decision is where the PMO sits. Place it close to executive decision-making so it can align the project portfolio to goals, surface trade-offs, and stop work that no longer makes sense. Give it a clear mandate and a sponsor who can unblock issues quickly. This sponsor is ideally either part of the executive suite or has good connections to the C-level.
2. Standardize the essentials, not everything.
Resist the urge to build a rulebook. Trust me, no one will ever read let alone remember what you put into a 33-page PDF. Instead, start with a “minimum viable governance” set: intake and prioritization, risk management, stakeholder engagement, and a simple status/benefits report. These few practices create comparability across efforts and enable sound decisions without slowing teams down.
3. Invest in people capability.
Delivery improves when teams get coaching in communication, leadership, and business acumen—and when they can choose the right delivery mode (predictive, agile, or hybrid) for the work. A PMO should run communities of practice (CoP), curate templates, and provide hands-on support, not just check compliance.
How to counter the nay-sayers with a strong “That’s why”
Common objections to committing resources towards a strong PMO range from “It’ll slow us down”, “We’re agile, we don’t need a PMO” to “It’ll become a compliance police”. Let’s address them each and round it up with a strong why from the year 2020.
“It’ll slow us down.”
Done badly, yes. Done right, a PMO removes friction: fewer surprises, less rework, faster decisions. Start small. Track useful KPIs like cycle time and throughput before and after to prove the point.
“We’re agile; we don’t need a PMO.”
Agile teams still need portfolio alignment, risk visibility, and cross-team coordination. A modern PMO supports agile delivery; it doesn’t fight it.
“It’ll become a compliance police.”
Only if you design it that way. Keep the PMO accountable for outcomes (benefits realized, predictability, throughput), not paperwork completed.
Apart from the impressive 2x higher revenue and 3x higher customer satisfaction mentioned in the beginning, let’s travel back in time to the year 2020. You may experience a slightly painful flashback, but it truly was the perfect storm to test if companies were weatherproof.
By April 2020, busy offices were vacated, streets were empty and literally everyone stocked up on toilet paper, as nearly half the world’s population was under some form of lockdown. If you were lucky enough to have worked for a company that was able to switch to remote work within a day without so much as losing a beat, congratulations: your organization has an agile mindset which makes it flexible in executing change and thus resilient in disruptive times like, let’s say, a global pandemic.
This pressure test for resilience underscored the excellence of the top performing PMOs. While 62% of the average-performing PMOs struggled to find opportunities to demonstrate their ability to deliver value for the company, 62% of the top PMOs did exactly that: use the disruption to prove their worth to the whole organization. They did that by prioritizing the acceleration of new ways of working and enhanced risk assessment and mitigation. Exactly what is always needed when the outside world starts acting up in unpredictable ways. And rest assured, disruptions need not happen on a global scale to pose a risk to your organization. So, have a PMO, strive to make it excellent or accept that most of your competitors will learn faster, waste less, and deliver more. Seems straightforward to me.
For more detailed stats, download the PMO Maturity Report and the PMI's Pulse of the Profession (R) 2021 from the PMI website.
1: Source: PMO Maturity: Lessons from the Global Top Tier, PMI and PwC, first published in 2022