John McIntyre
Founder, HotPMO
PMO News Roundup – February 2026
Every month I trawl through the research papers, reports, and podcasts so you don’t have to. Here’s what caught my eye this month.
A PMO’s 16-Year Journey: From IT Support to Board-Level Authority
The standout read this month is a longitudinal case study published in the Business Process Management Journal by António Monteiro at NOVA University Lisbon. It follows a single PMO inside a large European organisation over sixteen years — from its founding in 2009 as a small support unit within IT, all the way through to its current position as an enterprise-wide strategic function reporting directly to the board.
The thing that struck me about this paper was how recognisable the journey is. The PMO started life doing what a lot of PMOs start off doing: reporting project status, coordinating IT initiatives, keeping documentation in order. No influence on project selection. No seat at the strategy table. As the PMO Manager put it, “The decisions remained entirely with management…we had no influence on decisions”
The first shift was when the organisation started seeing fragmented processes, duplicated effort and delays. To tackle this, the PMO was given a broader remit to introduce standard methods and an increased remit for vendor management. It was still within IT, still not a decision making body, but they had moved from admin support to something closer to governance.
The next key shift was when the PMO was pulled out of IT entirely and given a direct reporting line to senior leadership. With that came the responsibility for strategic planning, portfolio prioritisation, project selection, benefits management and lessons learned. The board were clear about the rationale: “We needed a PMO that looked at the whole company. The previous IT-centred structure could no longer support the scale and strategic relevance of our portfolio.”
Interestingly, when it came to the organisation adopting AI in 2024, it was the PMO who were mandated to lead the organisations AI shift. Why? According to a board member of the company, “The PMO was the only unit with enough maturity and cross-organisational view to govern the complexity of AI adoption.”
I’ve seen this kind of journey play out with our own clients. A PMO that starts within a single department proves its value, and then gets asked the question “Could we get this across the wider organisation?”. Also “How can we utilise the skills in our PMO team to help us with non-traditional PMO activity?” In this case, it was AI. But I’ve seen PMOs take on similar challenges deploying BI solutions and even robotic process automation to help the organisation achieve its goals.
For me at least, this journey feels more real than the typical textbook perspective of a PMO that gradually works up through a maturity model from level 1-4 across various competencies. The PMOs that thrive, are the ones who align to the real needs of the business.
Another thing that was interesting in the paper was a table mapping common PMO functions against the research papers that have cited them over nearly two decades, starting with Monique Aubry’s foundational 2007 study. What stood out for me (as you can see in the chart below), was the longevity of some of the core PMO functions.
Things like developing standard methodologies have been cited consistently across every major study from 2007 right through 2025. We often talk about PMOs as constantly evolving – and they are. But underneath that evolution, is a remarkably stable core of services that PMOs have always delivered, and continue to deliver.
Read the full paper: Monteiro, A. (2026). The evolving mandate of project management offices: governance, innovation, and performance, evidence from a longitudinal case study. Business Process Management Journal. DOI: 10.1108/BPMJ-09-2025-1464
What the US Government Can Teach PMOs about Shared Services
This one comes from a slightly unexpected angle. The US Government Accountability Office published a report into the adoption challenges facing federal shared services — covering areas like HR and cybersecurity, not project management. But when you read it through a PMO lens, the parallels are striking. A lot of our PMOs are effectively shared services. We provide services to multiple parts of the business, across departments, sometimes across companies within a group. So the challenges the GAO identified land very close to home.
First, and unsurprisingly, role clarity and strong leadership come through as structural enablers. Shared services need executive sponsors, named and empowered decision-makers, clear escalation paths, and active cross-portfolio governance forums. If your PMO supports multiple functions, you need governance above it that can deal with the problems that span across portfolios. None of that is new, but it’s reassuring to see it confirmed from a completely different domain.
The report also highlights what happens when you mandate the use of a shared service without genuinely supporting it. They give examples where departments were told “you must use the shared service unless you have an approved business case to go outside it.” Well-intentioned, but without advocacy from leadership and genuine buy-in, what you actually get is workarounds. People find creative ways to dance around the rules rather than use the service properly. If you’ve ever launched a PMO process or template that people immediately found ways to avoid, you’ll recognise this pattern instantly.
Another finding that resonated: the shared services on offer didn’t always match the specific problems departments were trying to solve. There were gaps. How many times have you moved into a new PMO role and brought your existing toolbox with you, only to find it doesn’t quite fit? Every organisation is unique. It’s important to listen to what the business actually needs and make sure that what we’re proposing as the solution matches the demands of the business and the types of projects they’re delivering, rather than just applying what worked somewhere else.
And finally, the benefits question. The GAO found that shared services genuinely add value — but that value is often painfully hard to articulate. The critical shift they recommend is moving from anecdotal stories about how great the service is to tangible, trackable metrics. Here’s the line that should be on a poster in every PMO: if you don’t actively track benefits, the narrative will inevitably default to the PMO being seen as overhead. Worth remembering next time someone asks what the PMO actually does.
Read the report: GAO-26-108014, Federal Shared Services: Adoption Challenges Underscore the Need for Consistent Leadership
AI Transformation Works Through Desire, Not Imposition
For the podcast listeners, the February episode of PMI’s The Shift Code is worth your time. It features Luisa Barraza, VP of People at Pfizer, talking about AI transformation — and what makes it interesting is that she’s approaching it from a people perspective, not a technology one.
Her central message is that transformation doesn’t work through imposition; it works through desire. You can’t just hand people an AI tool and expect them to benefit from it. Success comes when people see personal value in the tool, understand the benefit it brings, and feel that it genuinely makes their work better.
We talk about this principle with transformation programmes all the time — meet people where they are, understand their problems, align the solution to their needs. But it bears repeating in the AI context, because there’s a lot of pressure right now to roll out AI tools quickly, and the temptation to impose rather than engage is very real. As Barraza puts it, “AI transformations don’t fail because the AI is weak. They fail because the rollout is misaligned with human needs.” Hard to argue with that.
Listen to the episode: The Shift Code — How Pfizer’s Luisa Barraza Rewrites the Rules of Transformation
People at the Heart of Projectification
Finally, the International Journal of Managing Projects in Business has dedicated its latest issue to a theme that deserves far more attention: people at the heart of projects. The editors note that existing scholarship has often prioritised systemic, organisational, or institutional perspectives at the expense of the individual. They’re right, and they’re trying to counter it.
There are some useful threads running through the papers in this issue. On ethical tensions in project decision-making, the key takeaway is that having values is great, but values alone don’t shift decision behaviour: you need systems and structures to back them up. If your PMO has a set of principles on a wall somewhere but no mechanisms to embed them in day-to-day decisions, they’re just words.
On knowledge transfer, the message is equally direct: knowledge does not automatically transfer between projects. We assume it magically diffuses across the organisation, but it doesn’t. Social relationships are what enable knowledge to flow. If you’re not actively creating those conditions and adopting practices such as Call3, your lessons learned are just documents that nobody reads.
The journal has also put out a call for papers, and the questions they’ve posed are worth reflecting on even if you have no intention of writing an academic paper. Think of them as a lens for looking at your own organisation. How is working in projects shaping people’s identity, motivation, and career paths? Are projects helping people grow, or are they creating instability and fragmentation? Are we building capability and engagement, or causing overload, short-termism, and fatigue? Do education, role, hierarchy, or culture influence who can participate and progress in project careers? And are our structures actually enabling people to succeed in projects, or are governance, autonomy, and leadership creating the wrong conditions?
Good questions, all of them. Worth a quiet ten minutes of reflection with a coffee.
This roundup is based on my monthly PMO News segment from the PMO HotHouse, run by the House of PMO. If you’re not already part of that community, it’s well worth a look.
If your PMO is going through its own evolution – whether that’s starting from scratch, expanding your mandate, or figuring out where AI fits – get in touch. It’s what we do.
