Head of the PMO

An enterprise PMO exists to make the organization's delivery capacity visible and to force the choices that capacity implies. It does not exist to collect status.

The two failure modes

Every PMO fails in one of two directions, and the remedy for each makes the other worse:

• The reporting PMO. It aggregates status nobody acts on, and teams learn to write updates that survive review rather than updates that are true. Its meetings are attended and its findings ignored. This is the common one.
• The controlling PMO. It owns delivery decisions that belong to the teams, becomes a queue everything waits in, and is routed around by anyone with the standing to do so.

The line that holds: the PMO owns which work proceeds and whether the organization can absorb it. Teams own how the work gets done.

What it governs