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đź‘» The Ghost of Enterprise PMOs Past đź‘»- Strategy Execution Office

  • Writer: Ben Chamberlain
    Ben Chamberlain
  • 3 days ago
  • 2 min read

There's a special kind of confidence it takes to walk into the C-Suite, a room full of people holding mugs that say "Prove It" and "Show Me the ROI," clasp your hands together like you're about to ask a personal favor, and pitch the sequel to the thing that broke their trust in the first place. 


Respect the nerve. Question the strategy.


Cartoon of a nervous presenter pitching a Strategy Execution Office to a skeptical boardroom, mugs reading "Prove It" and "Show Me the ROI," a cobweb-covered "Enterprise PMO" sign looming on the wall behind them

StratgeyXF's Principle 1 (of the 10 Key Principles to Master Strategy Execution), Expose the Cost of Poor Strategy Execution, is about making sure the C-Suite fully understands the business value at risk from poor Strategy Execution, and is genuinely willing to establish a Strategy Execution Office. The SEO is tasked with developing the Strategy Execution muscle across the organization, enabling a cohesive operating system that maximizes and accelerates value. 


But getting there means reckoning with something real. Past attempts at an Enterprise PMO or its equivalent may still be fresh in the C-Suite's mind, and for good reason. The scars are recent, specific, and sitting right there on a laptop screen full of red X's next to "Past PMO Results." Visibility, utilization, impact, adoption, value delivered, all failed, all remembered in vivid detail.


It has to be clear that this requires a fundamentally different mindset. Not a bigger governance layer, but a lean team of value architects, integrating and optimizing all critical functions within a lean operating system built to maximize and accelerate outcomes. 


That cohesive operating system connects Strategic Portfolio Management, Operating Model Design and Architecture, FP&A, Project Execution, and Change Management, not by layering more oversight on top of them, but by integrating them so value actually flows across the handoffs. 


The focus has to be on driving value, not on driving everyone slightly insane with overly rigid project and portfolio governance and rear view mirror status reporting that measures everything and delivers nothing. A new name on the slide doesn't fix that. Mandate, mindset, and operating model all have to be visibly different, or "we swear" is exactly what the last one said too.


Where has your organization had to overcome the ghost of a past failed initiative before anyone would even consider funding the next one? 👇 



StrategyXF Painfully Accurate Series (Sad, but True!)

This cartoon is part of Painfully Accurate, a StrategyXF series built from real challenges our members have actually lived through, laughed about, and found a way past. Every scene started as something a leader or practitioner described, not a hypothetical, an actual moment somebody in this community said out loud and everyone else in the room recognized instantly. Sad but true, every one of them, and every one of them survivable.


If any of this feels a little too familiar, you're exactly who this community was built for. Join StrategyXF and help us turn these shared war stories into the practical, personalized strategies that finally put them behind us.


 
 
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