As organizations continue to invest heavily in transformation and delivery, the role of the project management office (PMO) is being reexamined through a more strategic lens. The discussion below, facilitated with experienced Ankura program and project management consultants and leaders, explores how PMOs can move beyond traditional coordination and reporting to actively safeguard strategic intent as initiatives progress from vision to execution.
Executive Summary and Practitioner Perspectives
Ankura experts explore how effective PMOs act as an early warning system, connect leaders and delivery teams, and enable informed action when priorities shift, risks are surfaced, or the direction of the project must change. The focus remains on keeping execution aligned with strategic intent and delivering outcomes that matter to the organization.
Part one of this series explores the modern PMO’s shift toward a more strategic role and the changes needed to deliver outcomes through flexible, purpose-built delivery methods. The perspectives that follow reflect patterns we consistently observe when PMOs are asked to operate as strategic partners rather than reporting functions.
How to Read This Article
The Ankura Insights distill each topic into a brief executive‑level point of view that can be read straight through. Practitioner perspectives that follow add depth and real‑world experience for readers who want additional context.
In your experience, where do PMOs add the most value? Where does a PMO go wrong and why?
Ankura Insight
PMOs add the most value when they keep initiatives tightly aligned to enterprise strategy and measurable goals by prioritizing and approving work based on expected value. They act as strategic connectors and an early warning system by surfacing drift, risks, and needed course corrections in time for leadership to act. PMOs fail when they sit too low in the organization and shift into task tracking and reporting instead of driving strategy-led decisions and outcomes.
How Ankura Can Help
Ankura helps organizations position the PMO as a strategic partner by assessing portfolio alignment, intake discipline, and decision rights tied to enterprise priorities. We work with sponsors to strengthen governance and escalation paths, so misalignment and risk are surfaced early, and course corrections happen before value is lost.
Practitioner Perspectives
Jennifer Barbour
“PMOs add the most value when they keep initiatives tightly connected to enterprise strategy and measurable goals, rather than letting work proceed based on isolated justifications. They help ensure the intake pipeline is driven by expected value and that proposed projects are prioritized and approved because they advance top-level objectives. Without this alignment function, organizations end up funding low-value work that does not deliver what the business needs.”
Holly McClung
“The PMO must excel at clearly communicating when initiatives drift from strategic intent and when course correction decisions are made. Strategic communication should flow in all directions and remain central to the PMO’s role. This is not about task tracking or checklist management, it is about ensuring strategic intent carries through to delivery and that any threat to the project is surfaced quickly and addressed decisively.”
What is the most essential function of the PMO?
Ankura Insight
The PMO’s essential role is to provide honest visibility and enable timely, informed decisions. High‑performing PMOs surface misalignment and tradeoffs early and connect facts to strategy, rather than simply reporting status. When empowered to play this role, the PMO becomes a catalyst for effective execution, not an administrative function.
How Ankura Can Help
Ankura supports PMOs in serving as a trusted voice of reality by improving transparency, decision discipline, and the quality of information leaders rely on. We help clarify what meaningful visibility looks like and align governance and reporting to enable timely, strategy‑informed decisions.
Practitioner Perspectives
Holly McClung
“A PMO is most effective when it serves as the organization’s trusted voice of reality. The PMO should surface hard facts and maintain transparency even when it is uncomfortable. When leaders resist honest visibility, teams miss targets and drift into ineffective execution. The PMO should consistently act as a truth-telling advisor so the organization can address issues early and make course corrections.”
Who are typical customers of the PMO, and what expectations do they have?
Ankura Insight
PMOs serve a broad, and often competing, set of stakeholders across business, information technology (IT), finance, leadership, and external partners, each with distinct definitions of success. High‑performing PMOs create value by operating across these groups to reduce handoffs, anticipate risks and decisions, and make trade‑offs explicit when priorities conflict, keeping delivery aligned to outcomes that matter most to the organization.
Practitioner Perspectives
Jennifer Barbour
“The most effective PMOs can represent both business and IT needs within a single delivery environment, reducing handoffs and role duplication. They bring experience from prior programs to anticipate risks early and apply lessons learned before issues escalate. They also spot upcoming decisions and potential leadership misalignment and address them proactively to keep delivery moving.”
Dan Mather
“PMOs serve a wide set of stakeholders, including executives, business unit leaders, delivery teams, finance, and often external parties. Each group expects delivered outcomes that matter to them. Those expectations can conflict, such as prioritizing security versus speed. When done well, the PMO keeps teams focused on scope and outcomes while remaining flexible enough to manage competing priorities.”
What feedback do you frequently receive from PMO customers in an organization?
Ankura Insight
PMO customers most often cite cross functional silos, unclear prioritization when demand exceeds capacity, and insufficient leadership depth as the main drivers of execution issues. In response, the PMO is expected to align stakeholders on shared goals and strengthen decision making so delivery stays focused on the highest value outcomes.
Practitioner Perspectives
DeShawn McClain
“PMOs often say that their team lacks the skills needed to lead major changes and operate at a higher level. A common theme with our clients is insufficient technical leadership and depth, which limits the PMO’s ability to guide complex initiatives. As a result, they request expertise through team augmentation or a deliberate effort to build and upskill those capabilities internally.”
Dan Mather
“Customers also cite challenges with prioritization and alignment when resources are constrained and requests compete with one another. To avoid conflict, organizations often default to a first-in, first-out intake approach, which usually signals that leadership has not established a clear enterprise prioritization model. Additionally, when the PMO is not included in roadmap and prioritization discussions, resourcing decisions become arbitrary and outcomes suffer.”
What are the biggest challenges PMOs face in today’s environment?
Ankura Insight
Today’s PMOs face a growing mismatch between what they are expected to deliver and how they are structured, staffed, and empowered. As complexity, pace, and value expectations increase, PMOs struggle most when legacy models emphasize compliance and reporting over leadership, adaptability, and enterprise‑level decision support.
How Ankura Can Help
Ankura helps PMOs address the growing gap between rising expectations and legacy operating models by realigning structure, leadership capability, and enterprise decision support. We assess where compliance‑heavy approaches limit effectiveness and work with sponsors to modernize governance and clarify authority in complex environments.
Practitioner Perspectives
Jennifer Barbour
“A major challenge for PMOs is the rising expectation that they provide strong program leadership, not just project administration, which is why organizations often bring in outside support. Many initiatives need leaders who can guide execution, connect work to strategy, and build roadmaps that keep teams aligned. Without that leadership focus, PMOs can default to task management and lose sight of the larger outcomes.”
Dan Mather
“PMOs are under strain as the pace of change, the complexity of work, and rising expectations for measurable outcomes have outgrown traditional PMO models. Many still equate success with compliance and reporting, which slows adoption of agile, product, and hybrid delivery approaches.”
How does the PMO keep focus on outcomes vs. activity?
Ankura Insight
PMOs keep the focus on outcomes by shifting conversations away from effort, schedules, and activity toward measurable value and decision‑oriented progress. When governance, metrics, and reporting are designed to surface whether intended outcomes are being achieved, the PMO becomes a driver of course correction rather than a recorder of status.
Practitioner Perspectives
DeShawn McClain
“To keep the focus on outcomes, the PMO should work top-down from enterprise goals and clearly explain how each initiative supports those goals and delivers customer value. The PMO should build governance checkpoints to confirm teams are pursuing the right work and producing unbiased, enterprise-level outcomes. It also helps to align on what quality means in customer terms and use outcome value, not activity, to define red, yellow, and green and to prompt decisions on whether the work is still worthwhile.”
How does the PMO avoid the trap of too much process?
Ankura Insight
PMOs avoid the trap of too much process by applying only the level of governance required to support alignment, decisions, and outcomes. When standards are flexible, context‑aware, and routinely tested for value, process enables execution rather than slowing it down.
Practitioner Perspectives
Holly McClung
“The PMO should routinely check whether its governance is adding value or creating unnecessary work. Regular self-assessments help catch when the function is slipping into bureaucracy or enforcing process for its own sake. The PMO should also gather frequent stakeholder feedback on what is working and what is not, then use that input to simplify and improve how teams get work done.”
What does success look like for a PMO?
Ankura Insight
A successful PMO is one that leadership trusts to prioritize the right work and deliver measurable outcomes aligned to strategy. Success is reflected not in activity or artifacts, but in sustained confidence that execution is advancing enterprise priorities.
Practitioner Perspectives
Dan Mather
“A PMO is successful when leaders trust that the organization is prioritizing the right work, delivering it predictably, and achieving measurable business outcomes. Success is evident when the PMO is recognized for steady progress against strategic priorities, not just activity.”
What is the most effective way to mature a PMO?
Ankura Insight
PMOs mature when they shift from process compliance and delivery focus to value realization across the full initiative life cycle. That means defining and validating return on investment (ROI) early, confirming benefits after delivery, and taking stronger ownership of intake, prioritization, and resource decisions based on measurable business outcomes. They also need leaders who coach teams and apply standards flexibly to reduce friction and drive adoption.
How Ankura Can Help
We partner with clients to strengthen ownership of intake, prioritization, and outcome measurement while developing leaders who can quickly assess the landscape and adapt execution and delivery methods to ensure enterprise goals are continuously aligned with expected outcomes.
Practitioner Perspectives
Jennifer Barbour
“PMOs should keep value and ROI in focus for the full initiative life cycle, not just at delivery. Too often, teams realize years later that a solution is underused or fails to produce the benefits that justified the investment, sometimes because ROI was never clearly defined up front. Maturing the PMO means validating the business case during ideation and confirming after delivery that the expected results were achieved.”
Conclusion
To keep strategy from getting lost in execution, the modern PMO must operate as an outcomes-driven decision engine, not a reporting function. It creates value by aligning initiatives and stakeholders to enterprise priorities, surfacing risks, misalignment, and early tradeoffs, and enabling timely course corrections based on measurable value and ROI across the full life cycle. PMOs fall short when they lack authority and leadership depth or rely on rigid, compliance heavy processes that slow delivery instead of strengthening governance, clarity, and accountability.
© Copyright 2026. The views expressed herein are those of the author(s) and not necessarily the views of Ankura Consulting Group, LLC, its management, its subsidiaries, its affiliates, or its other professionals. Ankura is not a law firm and cannot provide legal advice.
