ORGANISATIONAL HEALTH
Why a PMO Often Harms Strategy More Than It Helps
29.12.2025
In recent years, not only PMOs but also “Strategic Management Offices”, “Transformation Management Offices”, and other variations have become almost mandatory features of the corporate landscape. As these structures appear, project and change activity subtly drifts into a separate lane, as if it were something managed by a special function rather than an integral part of what every manager is supposed to do. If a company is growing and launching more initiatives, one of these offices tends to appear alongside. On the surfac,e this feels reasonable: the more projects there are, the more a central coordination point seems necessary. Yet from the perspective of organisational health and the balance between owners’ intentions and organisational design, a PMO is often not the solution, but part of the problem.
Strategy Lives at Board Level
In a healthy (someone will surely read ‘ideal’) organisation, strategy does not emerge in a PMO or at the level of the Senior Leadership Team (SLT); it is created by the board and the owners. This is where big bets, risk appetite and the boundaries within which it even makes sense to talk about a portfolio and prioritisation are set.
The SLT’s role is not to create strategy, but to develop it, making it better informed and more executable: through high‑quality research, structuring options and facilitating tools such as Wardley Maps to improve situational awareness and transparency of the landscape. Despite wide misunderstanding, the final strategic decision remains an act of will by the owners and the BoD, rather than the product of internal managerial procedures.
PMO as Symptom Rather Than Solution
In many organisations, a PMO is created when the chaos becomes too visible: too many initiatives, missed deadlines, overspent budgets and a “black box” view of the portfolio. The formal justification is a need for a centre of excellence, standards and control, but in practice, the PMO often becomes a way of postponing a hard conversation about strategic priorities and an overloaded organisational design.
Instead of an honest discussion between the BoD and SLT of which directions truly matter, which must be stopped, and which should never have started, the company adds another layer that tidies up the consequences of not making clear choices. The PMO thus becomes a crutch for strategy: it masks symptoms without addressing root causes.
Pseudo‑Delegation of Responsibility to PMOs and Consultants
When boards and owners are unwilling to make tough choices, responsibility for “executing the strategy” is often pushed down — first to the SLT, then to the PMO, and sometimes to external consultants. The PMO is expected to “ensure delivery of the strategy," even though it has neither the mandate to influence initial decisions nor real levers to reallocate capital.
A similar pattern appears with consulting: boards commission external firms to produce strategy and roadmaps “end‑to‑end”, often outsourcing not only the analysis but also the moral burden of choice. The PMO and consultants then become convenient bearers of blame: when things go wrong, it is easy to say that “the numbers were wrong” or “the transformation failed," instead of acknowledging the absence of clear and consistent intent at the ownership level.
Atrophy of the SLT’s Strategic Muscles
Systematically outsourcing strategy work to consultants has another effect: over time, the SLT loses the ability to do this work on its own. Senior leaders get used to playing the role of data providers and workshop participants (at best!) rather than co‑owners of strategic decisions.
It is important to stress that the SLT’s strategic capability is not about polished slide decks or buying “research”. It is the ability to see the system’s configuration, frame options, make conscious trade‑offs, challenge the board’s thinking and design a coherent portfolio, rather than merely commenting on someone else’s recommendations. When consultants do this work for years, the internal team loses its muscle memory: even where it could act independently, the default reflex becomes “let’s launch a project with a firm."
The Cult of Research Instead of Choice
Environmental uncertainty pushes organisations towards collecting more data, reports and scenarios. In principle, this is rational, but in practice it often degenerates into an “eternal research”: maps, surveys, benchmarks and analytics multiply, while the real decision keeps being postponed.
Wardley Maps, strategic scorecards and other situational awareness tools are particularly sensitive in this respect. They are designed to help leaders understand the landscape and make deliberate choices, but when there is no readiness to choose, they become elegant artefacts maintained by the PMO with no mandate to alter course. Organisational health suffers: energy goes into ever more sophisticated representations of reality rather than into movement.
Complexity Inflation and Erosion of “Owner’s Logic”
A classic PMO almost inevitably adds new processes, metrics and rituals. Standardised templates, regular steering committees and formal status reporting appear, and a significant share of managers’ time is spent servicing these mechanisms rather than changing the business.
Meanwhile, the owners’ intentions and goals, i.e. thinking in terms of ROE/ROCE/ROI, options and the cost of time, is diluted in status reports, RAG indicators and percentages of tasks “on track”. Projects become optimised for PMO metrics (timelines, budget adherence, methodology compliance) rather than for enterprise value, asset quality and the robustness of the organisational design. From an organisational health perspective, this marks a shift from real system productivity towards complacency and self‑preservation.
A Possible Alternative: Office of Value, Not Office of Projects
None of this means that any coordination function is harmful by definition. In some cases, companies create structures focused not on project discipline but on value management: a Value Management Office or Strategy Delivery Office. Their focus is on the linkage between owners’ intentions, board decisions, the initiative portfolio and organisational design. From our perspective, this kind of function should sit in the asset‑owning entity — the HQ or Corporate Centre — rather than inside individual operating businesses, so that it remains anchored in owners’ intentions rather than being captured by local agendas.
In such a set‑up, the key task is not to “enforce methodology”, but to help owners and boards see how resource allocation, role architecture, accountability levels and span of control shape the organisation’s ability to realise strategic choices. This shifts the emphasis from execution control to deliberate system design: where to simplify, where to increase autonomy, and where to admit that some projects are symptoms of unclear or conflicting intentions.
What This Means for Organisational Health
From an organisational health perspective, having a PMO is usually neither proof of maturity nor a reliable marker of “good management”. What matters far more is the following:
Authors:
Pavel Charny, ORTALEX, Managing Partner, Dubai
Strategy Lives at Board Level
In a healthy (someone will surely read ‘ideal’) organisation, strategy does not emerge in a PMO or at the level of the Senior Leadership Team (SLT); it is created by the board and the owners. This is where big bets, risk appetite and the boundaries within which it even makes sense to talk about a portfolio and prioritisation are set.
The SLT’s role is not to create strategy, but to develop it, making it better informed and more executable: through high‑quality research, structuring options and facilitating tools such as Wardley Maps to improve situational awareness and transparency of the landscape. Despite wide misunderstanding, the final strategic decision remains an act of will by the owners and the BoD, rather than the product of internal managerial procedures.
PMO as Symptom Rather Than Solution
In many organisations, a PMO is created when the chaos becomes too visible: too many initiatives, missed deadlines, overspent budgets and a “black box” view of the portfolio. The formal justification is a need for a centre of excellence, standards and control, but in practice, the PMO often becomes a way of postponing a hard conversation about strategic priorities and an overloaded organisational design.
Instead of an honest discussion between the BoD and SLT of which directions truly matter, which must be stopped, and which should never have started, the company adds another layer that tidies up the consequences of not making clear choices. The PMO thus becomes a crutch for strategy: it masks symptoms without addressing root causes.
Pseudo‑Delegation of Responsibility to PMOs and Consultants
When boards and owners are unwilling to make tough choices, responsibility for “executing the strategy” is often pushed down — first to the SLT, then to the PMO, and sometimes to external consultants. The PMO is expected to “ensure delivery of the strategy," even though it has neither the mandate to influence initial decisions nor real levers to reallocate capital.
A similar pattern appears with consulting: boards commission external firms to produce strategy and roadmaps “end‑to‑end”, often outsourcing not only the analysis but also the moral burden of choice. The PMO and consultants then become convenient bearers of blame: when things go wrong, it is easy to say that “the numbers were wrong” or “the transformation failed," instead of acknowledging the absence of clear and consistent intent at the ownership level.
Atrophy of the SLT’s Strategic Muscles
Systematically outsourcing strategy work to consultants has another effect: over time, the SLT loses the ability to do this work on its own. Senior leaders get used to playing the role of data providers and workshop participants (at best!) rather than co‑owners of strategic decisions.
It is important to stress that the SLT’s strategic capability is not about polished slide decks or buying “research”. It is the ability to see the system’s configuration, frame options, make conscious trade‑offs, challenge the board’s thinking and design a coherent portfolio, rather than merely commenting on someone else’s recommendations. When consultants do this work for years, the internal team loses its muscle memory: even where it could act independently, the default reflex becomes “let’s launch a project with a firm."
The Cult of Research Instead of Choice
Environmental uncertainty pushes organisations towards collecting more data, reports and scenarios. In principle, this is rational, but in practice it often degenerates into an “eternal research”: maps, surveys, benchmarks and analytics multiply, while the real decision keeps being postponed.
Wardley Maps, strategic scorecards and other situational awareness tools are particularly sensitive in this respect. They are designed to help leaders understand the landscape and make deliberate choices, but when there is no readiness to choose, they become elegant artefacts maintained by the PMO with no mandate to alter course. Organisational health suffers: energy goes into ever more sophisticated representations of reality rather than into movement.
Complexity Inflation and Erosion of “Owner’s Logic”
A classic PMO almost inevitably adds new processes, metrics and rituals. Standardised templates, regular steering committees and formal status reporting appear, and a significant share of managers’ time is spent servicing these mechanisms rather than changing the business.
Meanwhile, the owners’ intentions and goals, i.e. thinking in terms of ROE/ROCE/ROI, options and the cost of time, is diluted in status reports, RAG indicators and percentages of tasks “on track”. Projects become optimised for PMO metrics (timelines, budget adherence, methodology compliance) rather than for enterprise value, asset quality and the robustness of the organisational design. From an organisational health perspective, this marks a shift from real system productivity towards complacency and self‑preservation.
A Possible Alternative: Office of Value, Not Office of Projects
None of this means that any coordination function is harmful by definition. In some cases, companies create structures focused not on project discipline but on value management: a Value Management Office or Strategy Delivery Office. Their focus is on the linkage between owners’ intentions, board decisions, the initiative portfolio and organisational design. From our perspective, this kind of function should sit in the asset‑owning entity — the HQ or Corporate Centre — rather than inside individual operating businesses, so that it remains anchored in owners’ intentions rather than being captured by local agendas.
In such a set‑up, the key task is not to “enforce methodology”, but to help owners and boards see how resource allocation, role architecture, accountability levels and span of control shape the organisation’s ability to realise strategic choices. This shifts the emphasis from execution control to deliberate system design: where to simplify, where to increase autonomy, and where to admit that some projects are symptoms of unclear or conflicting intentions.
What This Means for Organisational Health
From an organisational health perspective, having a PMO is usually neither proof of maturity nor a reliable marker of “good management”. What matters far more is the following:
- Whether owners and the board have clear, articulated intentions translated into tangible strategic boundaries and priorities.
- Whether the SLT understands its role as the carrier of situational awareness and the designer of options, rather than as the author of strategy (instead of the BoD).
- Whether PMOs and consultants act as instruments that test and strengthen those choices — for example, as facilitators asking uncomfortable questions, surfacing hidden assumptions and helping owners and boards see real trade‑offs — or are used as a way to avoid such questions altogether.
Authors:
Pavel Charny, ORTALEX, Managing Partner, Dubai