Before You Improve PMO Maturity, Ask If You're Doing the Right Work

A few years ago I worked with the PMO of a regional energy company that looked outstanding on paper. Its services were clearly defined, its tools were integrated and its latest PMO maturity assessment placed it ahead of the industry curve. Its pride was a monthly portfolio report: 40 pages, about 120 projects, every number reconciled with finance.

Then we talked to the executives who received it. Most read the first page when they had time. Their investment decisions were made somewhere else, in a quarterly committee working from a spreadsheet finance put together the week before.

Nothing in the assessment was wrong. The PMO was doing its work well. But the people it did that work for no longer needed it in that form.

That is the cost of maturity without alignment: polished work that nobody needs. To be ready to generate value, a PMO needs both, a condition I call PMO value readiness. It combines alignment, which is choosing the right work, with maturity, which is doing that work well. PMO maturity can only tell you about the second, which is why alignment should decide where you invest in maturity.

PMO service maturity measures how well the work is done

Maturity and alignment answer different questions, so I'm keeping the two apart here on purpose, to show what delivery alone can and can’t tell you.

PMO service maturity is the sophistication and effectiveness with which a selected service is delivered, meaning how consistently and how well the PMO performs it. A PMO that can't deliver consistently won't be trusted, whatever it offers. But a service maturity assessment starts from a list of services and asks how well each one is performed, without asking where the list came from.

Alignment asks whether it is the right work

Alignment is about choosing and prioritizing services based on what customers need now, the outcomes they expect and the organization's priorities.

Customers make this harder than it sounds by asking for solutions rather than needs. They ask for a dashboard when what they need is faster investment decisions, so a service can be popular and misaligned, or unpopular and still the right one.

Alignment also wears off as strategy shifts, sponsors change and decisions rights move. A charter or a service catalog only proves that the need existed when someone wrote it down.

So alignment has to be judged continually as the organization changes, with the people the PMO serves, through the outcomes they need. A PMO that checks its own alignment will usually find it.

What the alignment and service maturity matrix reveals

Alignment and maturity are independent of each other, so a PMO can be well aligned and immature, or highly mature and misaligned.

Putting the two together gives you four situations, each with its own priority.

• An emerging PMO is working on the right things but can't yet deliver them consistently. This is where maturity investment pays off most, with every improvement landing on work that matters.
• A misaligned performer is the opposite, and the energy company's PMO was one. It excels at execution, but its services miss what customers need, so its value goes unrecognized.
• An at-risk PMO is weak on both counts, and its legitimacy is usually low. Putting more into its services before validating the need only deepens the problem.
• In a value-ready PMO, high alignment and high maturity come together to create a strong potential for real, recognized value. That makes value readiness a threshold rather than a result. Readiness still has to be activated, which means being in the conversations where customers make decisions. A PMO can be value-ready without being value-active.

Assess alignment before deciding what to mature

How do you improve a PMO's capabilities without investing in services the organization no longer needs? Ask whether a service is needed before you ask how well it’s delivered, starting with the services that take up most of your capacity. For each one, ask four things:

1. Who is this service for, and what outcome is it supposed to help them achieve?

2. Does that outcome still serve a current organizational priority, which is the test of strategic alignment?

3. What would its customers lose if it stopped tomorrow, in their own words rather than your team's?

4. If the need holds up, would better delivery make a noticeable difference to the outcome?

The answers point to one of four decisions. Improve the service when the need is valid and better delivery would change the outcome. Sustain it when it's aligned and already delivered well, and put the effort into activating its value. Redesign it when the need is still there but the service no longer meets it. Retire it when the need is gone. Before you retire a mature service, though, ask the people it serves what they would lose if it stopped, because a service that works well can make the problem it solves invisible.

Then repeat the exercise whenever strategy shifts or a key sponsor changes. The next article in this series takes the fourth question further: how to assess PMO service maturity and decide what to improve first.

Improve what matters

A PMO can spend years getting better at the wrong work, and a PMO maturity assessment will reward it for every one of those years. That isn't a flaw in maturity models, which measure what they were built to measure. The trouble starts when a higher score becomes the goal in itself, because maturity only creates value when it's applied to the right work.

The energy company's executives would have lost nothing without that 40-page report. What they lacked was a clear view of which projects were competing for the same money and people, so the PMO and finance turned the report into a two-page brief for the investment committee. For a while it scored lower on maturity than the old report, but it was also the first thing the executives asked for by name.

So, pair every maturity question with an alignment question. Before you ask how to deliver a service better, ask who needs it now. And once your PMO is value-ready, ask whether it's also value-active.

Project Management Offices: A Practice Guide gives you the instruments to assess both sides of value readiness in your own PMO: how well your services are aligned with customer needs and organizational priorities, and how maturely you deliver them.

For a quicker start, PMOGA community has built two free apps that put these ideas into practice, available at pmovr.lovable.app. One helps you prioritize your PMO services around the outcomes your customers need, which is where alignment starts, and the other assesses the maturity of the services you already deliver.

Tags: PMO | Strategy | Customer Feedback | Performance | Continuous Improvement

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