Is the PMO still relevant? Yes, but not the one you remember

Every few years someone announces the end of the project management office. Agile teams plan their own work. Software tracks progress by itself. Leaders say they never read the reports anyway. Each time, the argument sounds convincing, and each time, a few years later, organizations rebuild something that looks very like a PMO under a different name.

The research says the same. Monique Aubry, who with Brian Hobbs led a long research program on PMOs that included a survey of 500 of them, summed it up for practitioners in 2016: “Research just shows that 80% of organizations changed their PMO after 3 years.” The reasons, she added, “are various and not necessarily associated with something wrong.”

Both sides of the argument are right about something. A certain kind of PMO is disappearing, and it deserves to. The work underneath it is not disappearing at all; there is more of it than ever. What follows is the case against the PMO, taken seriously, and what is left once that case has been heard.

The case against

The argument against the PMO is not made by people who dislike structure. It is made by people who have watched one at work.

They have seen status reports produced every two weeks and read by nobody. They have seen templates that take longer to fill in than the work they describe. They have seen an office that asked for information and gave nothing back, that measured compliance with its own method rather than whether projects delivered anything, and that slowed every team down in the name of consistency. Peter Drucker named the problem in Harvard Business Review in 1963, long before anyone had a PMO to complain about: “There is surely nothing quite so useless as doing with great efficiency what should not be done at all.” The wording has been traced to that article by Quote Investigator.

They have also seen teams that organize themselves well without any of it: short planning cycles, visible boards, regular demonstrations of working results. Next to that, a central office collecting reports looks like an overhead from another era.

All of this is fair. We have written separately about why PMOs are abandoned, and the design decision that prevents it, and the pattern is real.

What actually disappeared

Look closely at what the critics object to, and most of it is clerical: chasing people for status, consolidating spreadsheets into a monthly pack, checking that documents exist and follow a format.

That work is disappearing, and it should. Modern tools collect much of it as a side effect of the work itself. A team that plans and tracks its work in a shared system does not need someone to ask it what it did last week. The time an office used to spend gathering information can now go somewhere more useful, provided the office knows where.

The Project Management Institute saw the shift coming in its 2018 Pulse of the Profession, a survey of more than 5,400 practitioners, executives and PMO directors. Organizations, it reported, were empowering the PMO “to shift the focus from an administrative function to one that manages value delivery,” and it added: “The strategic role of the PMO and enterprise project management office (EPMO) will continue to be vital, no matter what they are called.”

An office whose whole value was in the clerical work has nothing left to offer. That is the PMO that is disappearing.

What did not disappear

Now look at the questions no team can answer for itself.

Which of the forty things the organization wants to do should it actually do this year, given the people it has? Which can wait, and which should stop? When two projects need the same five specialists in the same quarter, who decides, and on what basis? When one project’s delay will break three others, who sees it coming? When a project finishes, did the benefit it promised arrive, or did the organization simply move on to the next one?

These are portfolio questions, and most organizations answer them badly by not answering them at all. A McKinsey study of more than 1,600 US companies over fifteen years found that “most companies allocate the same resources to the same business units year after year”: for one business in three, the capital it received in a given year was almost exactly what it had received the year before. The companies that moved resources most actively earned, on average, 30 percent higher total returns to shareholders each year than those that moved them least. The study is about capital across business units, not projects, but the lesson carries: the choosing is where the value is, and the default is not to choose.

Michael Porter put it in one sentence in Harvard Business Review’s “What Is Strategy?” in 1996: “The essence of strategy is choosing what not to do.”

These questions do not go away when teams become more autonomous. They become sharper. An organization running more work in parallel, with more of it done by small self-directed teams, has more dependencies, more competition for the same scarce people, and more opportunities to start things it never finishes. Autonomy at the level of the team makes coordination at the level of the portfolio more necessary, not less.

PMI’s newest edition of the Pulse, published in 2026, names the same conditions: “The factors behind organizational complexity — unclear decision authority, competing priorities and misaligned objectives — are precisely the conditions that a well-functioning PMO is designed to address by ensuring the organization has the governance, visibility and relational infrastructure to navigate it.” In its survey of more than 2,500 professionals and senior leaders, those working in organizations with a PMO were more likely to say they managed complex projects very or extremely well (63% against 57%). The gap is modest, and it is self-reported, but it points the same way.

Somebody has to help the leadership team answer those questions with real information. That is the work that remains.

The PMO that stays

The office that survives looks different from the one that is disappearing, in four ways.

It supports decisions instead of collecting reports. Its main product is the information a leadership team needs to choose: what is underway, what it costs, what it needs, what is at risk, and what would happen if something stopped. Its main event is the portfolio review where those choices are made.

It manages capacity, not just projects. It knows how many people with which skills the organization actually has, and it says plainly when the list of commitments is longer than the people available to deliver it. That one sentence, said early and with evidence, is worth more than a year of status reports.

It follows value, not activity. It asks, after delivery, whether the benefit arrived, and it brings the answer back to the people who will choose the next round of work. Few organizations do this well: in PMI’s 2018 survey, only one in three reported high maturity in realizing benefits, and PMI described the common failure as managing projects on time, scope and budget “without consistently tracking whether they help the organization achieve its larger strategic goals.”

It fits the method to the work. Some projects are best run in short iterative cycles, some need a careful plan because the cost of getting them wrong is high, and many are a mix of both. PMI’s 2024 Pulse found the use of hybrid approaches rising from 20% of respondents in 2020 to 31.5% in 2023, and reported that “the project management approach adopted alone has no significant impact on higher project performance rates.” The method is not what decides success; fitting it to the work is. The office that stays helps each team choose a way of working that fits, rather than imposing one method on everything. It offers services people ask for, and it earns its authority by being useful.

Its shape depends on size

In a small organization, the PMO may be one person, or part of one person’s role: keeping the list of everything underway, preparing a monthly review with the leadership team, and helping project leads who are in difficulty. A spreadsheet is enough.

In a larger organization, the same function becomes an office close to the executive team, sometimes called a strategy or enterprise office, which links the portfolio to the strategy, manages capacity across departments and reports on benefits. The tools become more serious because there is a practice for them to support.

The size is set by the maturity the organization actually has, not by what a larger organization has. We measure first and design to the level.

Is yours the old kind?

Five questions tell you quickly.

When the PMO’s report arrives, does a decision follow it? If not, the report is serving the office, not the organization.

Can the PMO say whether the organization has more work committed than people to do it? If not, it is missing its most valuable piece of information.

Has the PMO ever recommended stopping a project? An office that never recommends stopping anything is counting projects, not managing a portfolio. Drucker’s test for every activity, set out in his writing on what he called planned abandonment, is the right one for every project on the list: “If we did not do this already, would we, knowing what we now know, go into it?”

Do teams come to the PMO for help, or only when they are told to? Requests for help are the best measure of an office’s usefulness.

Does anyone check, after delivery, whether the promised benefit arrived? If nobody does, the organization is measuring effort, not results.

Why it stays

The PMO stays because organizations still have to choose, and choosing well across many competing pieces of work is hard. It changes because what they need from it is help with choosing, not control over doing. An office built around that difference is not an overhead. It is how a leadership team sees its own organization clearly enough to steer it.

If your organization has an office that is being worked around, or is wondering whether it needs one at all, the starting point is the same: a short look at the list of work, the people available to do it and the forum where choices are made. That is the Map stage of how we work, and it is useful on its own.

Sources

• Monique Aubry, Organizing for Projects: The Integrative Role of PMO, PMO Conference, London, 2016, drawing on Hobbs and Aubry, The Project Management Office: A Quest for Understanding (PMI, 2010), and Aubry, Hobbs, Müller and Blomquist, Identifying the Forces Driving Frequent Change in PMOs (PMI, 2011).
• Peter F. Drucker, “Managing for Business Effectiveness,” Harvard Business Review, May 1963; wording and attribution checked by Quote Investigator, 2017.
• Peter F. Drucker, Drucker on Planned Abandonment, Drucker Institute, adapted from Management Challenges for the 21st Century (1999) and earlier works.
• Stephen Hall, Dan Lovallo and Reinier Musters, How to put your money where your strategy is, McKinsey Quarterly, March 2012.
• Michael E. Porter, What Is Strategy?, Harvard Business Review, November–December 1996.
• Project Management Institute, Pulse of the Profession 2018: Success in Disruptive Times, 2018.
• Project Management Institute, Pulse of the Profession 2024: The Future of Project Work, February 2024.
• Project Management Institute, Pulse of the Profession 2026: Driving Success in Complex Projects, May 2026.