“We send this report because we’ve always sent it.” That is the honest answer to the question of why roughly half of what the PMO asks of project managers exists at all. Nobody says it out loud, but every PM who has filled in the same template in three versions for three audiences knows that sentence.
A PMO is rarely built in one go. It grows in layers. One project went off the rails, so a new review was added. The board once asked for a summary, so the summary became permanent. A new director brought their own template, and nobody switched off the old one. A few years later you have a structure in which every element once had a good reason, only nobody remembers what it was.
Optimization won’t help
The typical response to an overloaded PMO is optimization. We cut the template from twelve pages to eight. We merge two meetings into one. We automate the data collection for the report. All of this is reasonable, and all of it assumes that the element should exist in the first place.
The zero-based approach flips the question. You don’t ask “how do we make this report faster?” but “if we were building the PMO from a blank page today, would this report exist?” If the answer is no, optimizing it is work put into something you don’t need.
It’s the same logic as zero-based budgeting: every line has to justify itself today, not because it was in last year’s budget.
Three questions for every element
Take any element of the PMO’s work: a report, a gate, a template, a weekly meeting. Ask it three questions.
Who reads it and what do they do with it? Not “who receives it”, but who actually reads it. A report sent to fifteen people, none of whom has replied in a quarter, has zero readers in practice.
What decision does it feed? Every PMO element should, at some point, lead to a decision: let the project continue, add people, shift a priority, close it. If you can’t point to the decision this element feeds, it is an archive, not a management tool.
What happens if it disappears for a month? This is the simplest test and the most painful one. If nobody asks where the report is after a month without it, you have your answer.
What usually goes first
In my experience, three kinds of things drop out fastest in a review like this.
The first is duplicated reports. The same project status described three times, in three formats, for three audiences who in practice sit on the same committee. One version is enough, if it’s a good one.
The second is gates without decisions. A stage review where nobody has ever stopped a project isn’t a gate, it’s a ritual. The project always passes, so its only effect is a week of preparation.
The third is templates filled in for the template’s sake. Fields the PM completes because they’re mandatory, not because anyone needs the information. You’ll recognize them because they have held the same content, copied from the previous project, for years.
What stays
After a reset like this, surprisingly little remains, but what remains is solid. One place where you can see all projects and their priorities relative to each other, which is exactly where the priority gap between the PMO and the board becomes visible. A clear risk escalation path, meaning everyone knows who decides and how fast. A few decision points where a project can genuinely be stopped. A shared definition of what green, amber and red mean.
The rest are things that may exist, but don’t have to. It’s good if someone checks from time to time whether they still have to.
What if you’re not the head of the PMO?
Most PMs don’t have the authority to rebuild the PMO. They do have authority over their own project, and projects grow layers too. A meeting that once made sense. A spreadsheet you keep alongside the tool. A status you write for someone who no longer works on the project.
Walk through your project with the same three questions. Who reads it, what decision does it feed, what happens if it disappears. Whatever you throw out gives you time back. Whatever you can’t throw out because the PMO requires it, write down. It’s one of the small moves that separates a PM who administers from a PM who thinks strategically: if someone ever asks what in the PMO gets in the way of projects, you’ll have a list instead of an impression.
One question for this week
Which report or meeting in your project exists only because it has always existed? Try not doing it this week and see whether anyone notices.
All situations described in this article are based on real events, but contain no company names, no individual names, and no data from any specific project.
