#161 | Vanilla PMO: From Chaos to Control

What’s the secret to building a successful PMO from scratch? Start with vanilla.

In this solo episode, I share a career’s worth of lessons on setting up a Project Management Office that delivers real value—right from day one. Just like vanilla is the foundation for the most creative ice cream flavors, a “vanilla PMO” provides the essential ingredients before layering on complexity.

With over 20 years of experience across industries, I unpack what a PMO actually does, why executive support is non-negotiable, and how to treat PMO implementation as its own strategic project. I reveal the five foundational capabilities every PMO must have—stakeholder management, planning and design, methodology frameworks, change management, and controls—and share a cautionary tale of a client drowning in 96 active projects without the resources to support them.

This episode is a must-listen for project professionals and leaders looking to avoid common PMO pitfalls. From balancing structure with flexibility, to managing first impressions that last, this is your blueprint for creating a PMO that’s lean, adaptive, and impactful.

In this episode, I cover:

0:00 Introduction to the Vanilla Concept
 4:52 Understanding PMO Purpose and Setup
 8:02 Five essential PMO Capabilities 
 15:28 Being Adaptive and Agile in PMO
 18:23 Final Thoughts and Recommendations
 And more…

Have you built a PMO from the ground up—or thinking about it? Tune in to learn how to create a solid foundation that supports growth, governance, and agility. Then, share your PMO wins or challenges—I’d love to hear your Agile Ideas.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Vanilla PMO Concept
• 4:52 Understanding PMO Purpose and Setup
• 8:02 Five Essential PMO Capabilities
• 15:28 Being Adaptive and Agile in PMO
• 18:23 Final Thoughts and Recommendations

Transcript

Fatimah Abbouchi - Host

00:00

You're listening to Agile Ideas, the podcast hosted by Fatimah Abbouchi. For anyone listening out there not having a good day, please know there is help out there. Hi everyone and welcome back to another episode of Agile Ideas. I'm Fatimah, CEO at Agile Management Office, mental Health Ambassador and your host. On today's episode, I'm going to be talking to you about the vanilla PMO. 

00:28

Now, the vanilla PMO is effectively what I would consider the fundamentals necessary to introduce a PMO within your organization. And for those that are not clear, I'll take you through what a PMO is, what it does, what you need to do to set up a PMO and what are the capabilities that are absolutely necessary to effectively get started. Now, when we think about vanilla, I'm referring to vanilla in terms of the most simple way of starting with your project management office or your program management office, and everyone loves vanilla, right? So if you're like me and you like ice cream, you probably like vanilla. Most people do. So let's just get started. Vanilla is the foundation that you can layer toppings and you can layer things on top of to make it extra, more delicious. But for now, when we think about vanilla PMO, I want to help you understand what it is and what you need to do to set it up and what I would focus on if I was starting a new PMO. And particularly early on in your career, when you're doing it for the first time or a second time, it's probably something you want to start with. So let's get straight into it Now. 

01:42

If your company often struggles with project management and perhaps your team runs projects regularly, doesn't currently have a project management office, then having a vanilla PMO can just be the right level of governance that will be needed to help sort of bring some order to the project management chaos that usually ensues when we end up having lots and lots of projects going at the same time. And so I'm going to take you into a little bit more about what you need to think of when considering your PMO for the first time. But the question I would ask you to consider is where is this initial idea come from? The reason I ask this question is because if you have thought about setting up a PMO and it's been an idea that you have come up with yourself and therefore you have not got a directive from management, then you're going to struggle a little bit from the outset, and the reason for that is traditionally and for a really long time, the project management office, or PMO, has not typically garnered the right level of support to not only have executives back the function, but also to provide a seat at the table. Now this, of course, does not apply to every company, because there are plenty of examples now where a PMO sits at the enterprise level. But we're not going to go there. We're going to focus on a vanilla PMO, a PMO that is there starting out from scratch, really just dipping their toe in the water, and this might be at a company who's never had a PMO, or maybe in a team of a larger company that has never had a PMO, or perhaps there was one and it wasn't that effective, and so you're trying to sort of reset and put something in place that's going to be more effective. 

03:49

Now, thinking about keeping projects on track, obviously you'll have the project managers there doing what they do best, but the project management office will support delivery in completing projects on time and budget. They will support helping with things such as resource management. It will help with delegation of tasks. It will help with identifying risks and issues. The project management office varies in what it does across companies globally. I've not seen two PMOs that are completely alike and therefore they need to be tailored to the unique circumstances that you're in. And one of the other questions I would ask you to consider is where are you in terms of project management maturity in your company? Now, if your maturity within the company not as an individual, but as a company overall is low, then your vanilla PMO is going to be the right way to just get your foot in the door. 

04:50

So, now that you know a little bit more about what the PMO is and the concept of the vanilla PMO, what do you need to do to set it up? So setting up a PMO initially is kind of like its own project. You will have the scope, which is effectively the capabilities you want to introduce. You will have a sort of definitive timeline of how long that you have and it might be, you know, a timeline that might be initially of a three-month cycle or six months, and then you'll just continuously improve it. And you'll often not directly have a budget, because seldom PMOs are given budgets unless they're at the enterprise level. But you'll probably be given a budgeted amount of resource effort, ie a PMO manager, or maybe a PMO manager and a couple of resources, so that's where I would consider that's your budget. Resources, so that's where I would consider that's your budget. And so clearly define your goals and do planning upfront before you start building anything. 

05:52

One of the traps that we get stuck in in the project management office world is trying to please everyone all at the same time, and that's not an effective way to start, because the problem is then you over commit and you will under deliver. Instead, think about what goals you have and the way that you would do that is usually. You may, at this point, have undertaken a little bit of an assessment, a capability assessment. I spoke about that in a different podcast episode, so feel free to check that out to learn more about capability assessments and therefore you have clarity on the goals for your PMO. You'll also have identified the right people to work with and possibly, by this point, you would have identified the types of change that is needed, including changes around process capabilities, tools, etc. 

06:44

Now, in order to achieve those goals, you need to have a workable plan that ensures that all of the elements of your vanilla PMO can come together successfully. As I said, more than anything else, you must understand what kind of capabilities and resources or skills that you need to have in place for your team to succeed, resources or skills that you need to have in place for your team to succeed. As with any starting out PMO, you might just be a one person band, and that's okay and it's very common. So if that's the case, you need to think about, from a capability perspective, what are all the things that are essential at the beginning, that are more essential than maybe some of the things that can wait a little bit longer or maybe not as pressing. So if you're wondering what you should focus on first, I'm going to tell you about the five major capability areas that you should have in place that really will help your vanilla PMO. Now, this list is not exhaustive and this list is probably not one that every PMO professional will agree with, but it is definitely what I've seen over the last 20 years as the most important building blocks for your vanilla PMO. 

07:59

So the first one is stakeholder management. So stakeholder management is critical, regardless of what we do for work, whether we're running projects, running a business, it's irrelevant of what you're doing, but stakeholders are always at the core. Just like that with projects. Without stakeholders or stakeholder buy-in, it'll be nearly impossible to deliver an effective project. Stakeholders themselves often will have valuable insights that help keep us on track. They may provide input to resourcing, to budgets, to tasks, to our timelines. They might be subject matter experts from across the business. Stakeholders might be the executives that are being provided updates on how the program or project is going. And then, for PMOs, typically, stakeholders include the wider delivery teams, including the project managers. So it's really important to keep providing communication to these stakeholders, tracking progress and keeping them in the loop. And when you define the stakeholder management approach for this capability, you want to think about the frequency and the cadence of the communications and the type of communications so that when your PMO is up and running, it will improve collaboration across departments or cross-functional teams and help you make sure that projects stay on track and that your PMO can be successful. So this is my first major capability that I would recommend that you consider and embed a process around. 

09:26

The second one I would say is all about planning and design. The planning and design aspects come next on the scale of importance, because you can't just rush into setting up a PMO without investing the time and resources in planning and design. Think about this If you are working in a company who doesn't have a planning and design or ideation process whatever you want to call it then it's probably likely that you will work on a million different things at the same time and not really hit any of the strategic goals. One example I refer to is one of our clients had us undertake a little bit of a project amnesty and undertake a little bit of research to find all of the projects that existed within their company. Now this company ended up having over 96 projects. Now that may not sound like a lot if you're thinking about it being a big business, but it wasn't. It was more of a mid-sized business and the budget they had didn't even support a third of those projects. So when we think about planning, design, ideation etc. 

10:34

The PMO should take the same focus in planning and designing their PMO and making sure that you have clarity around the strategy as well as the overall direction of your PMO and helping companies to embed a planning. Design capability is also one of the most commonly sought after and problematic capabilities typically Now in some companies they call it ideation, others they call it pipeline planning, others they call it portfolio management planning there's a lot of different names for it, but ultimately it's about identifying changes that are needed and planning that change. So that would be the second capability that I would stress of importance. The third one is around framework and methodology management. So typically, methodologies that relate to project management usually exist when you've got project managers and projects active, but what the PMO needs to do is make sure that the framework and the guardrails around that, particularly when it comes to governance, are clear and are aligned to that delivery methodology. A PMO should not be built based on a delivery methodology. It should support delivery methodologies based on the governance side of things, and in order to make sure that you have the right frameworks in place to support the projects, you also need to understand what methodologies exist within the company. Project management, resource management, stakeholder management, deadline management all of these things can be ultimately more successful by having the right frameworks and right methodologies in place. So this is a really integral part of the PMO and having some of that defined upfront and early will really help you be successful long-term. 

12:24

The fourth one is something that is not commonly factored in and not factored in early enough, but it's change management. Now, in terms of change management here I'm not referring to the change and comms process that typically is managed by a change manager or a change management function that works alongside delivery or works in delivery, but more so the change management factor of setting up your vanilla PMO. And that's because your PMO can't fully flex its muscles if change management is overlooked. You need to be able to identify when the change will be necessary, how best to manage it and how. That overall vision for your vanilla PMO is never set in stone. It will continuously iterate over time and based on new feedback from customers. You might have to modify your project plan, you might have to modify what you thought were the priorities, and that's all part of being adaptable. So having a change management process in place will make adapting to new approaches or changes more easier and with less disruption. That will ensure that your PMO can be more flexible and remain agile in terms of agility amidst rapidly changing environment around you. So change management would be number four, and then number five would be controls management. 

13:51

Now, this again would have lots of different names, but ultimately, good control management is absolutely essential for an effective PMO. It will provide structure, decision-making clarity, accountability, assurance of process compliance all of the things that are necessary for good governance. Project controls around resourcing, tasks, timelines, risks, issues, dependencies are things that you would need to define upfront and early so that projects don't go off on their own tangents. But also you don't want projects correcting their own homework, so to speak. So it makes it easier for everyone involved in a particular project or program to stay coordinated and ensure alignment by having the right controls in place, and within those controls you might have stage gating processes, you might have processes around risks and issues, processes around identifying dependencies and other processes that are all relevant to maintaining control within a project and a program. Control within a project and a program Controls management is. Control can be a word that is not seen as pleasantly, but it's more about controlling the aspects of projects and programs as opposed to controlling project managers. You don't want to do that because then you won't have the stakeholder buy-in that's necessary for you to be successful. 

15:08

Now, when you think about those five key capabilities, I think they're the most essential and they're the ones that I would start with if I was starting a brand new vanilla PMO, and then, over time, you can continuously adapt, evolve and improve them, and to do so, one of the things I would stress is think about being more adaptive and agile. In terms of agility, to enable you to reach the goals that you're trying to reach, one of the best ways of dealing with uncertainty is bring people together from different areas, and then you'll have subject matter experts across finance or resource, hr, projects, etc. That can provide you but also help you break down silos and collaborate more effectively. Be flexible in your approach to project management. PMOs often think that they may know everything and have all the answers, but you've got sometimes really talented project leaders that have a lot of experience, and so take that feedback on board and try to factor that into your processes and your setup. I encourage experimentation, because you need to be able to be prepared to pivot quickly when needed, and being able to experiment with the freedom of trying out new things, whether it's methods or approaches, et cetera can also make sure that you can respond better to changes in strategy or market conditions. 

16:32

Embrace technology. Now, one thing I will say with technology and tool don't go out and rush to buy tools and technology because you think it'll make your life easier. Think about understanding the processes before you bring in the tools and the technology, to make sure that the PMO itself can stay flexible and also be more effective and collaborative. There are many, many different tools that exist within the company you're working in, probably, and that are in the market that will help you. One of the most common tools is a project portfolio management tool, but again, I wouldn't be bringing that in after the first phase of setting up a vanilla PMO. It's probably going to be too much, too quick. So take the time to plan that into your roadmap and finally, as I've said before, encourage communication and welcome feedback on that journey. 

17:27

With this kind of culture embedded within the companies, members of the PMO and all the wider project community can get to know each other, work better, discuss ideas freely, and this will encourage proactive collaboration, which not only helps the team reach its goals faster, but it will also keep everyone on the same page. So, as I say, ultimately setting up a PMO will require considerable amount of effort and understanding, and it only takes one time to make a first impression, and if it's done incorrectly or people have a bad experience with PMOs, the chances of success are slimmer. So I recommend understand the key capabilities of your PMO before committing to establishing one. Recommend understand the key capabilities of your PMO. Before committing to establishing one, know what right, what right size and maturity looks like for your company to start with. And then, as I always say, there are many, many flavours of ice cream, just like there are flavours of PMO. But we all know that if you start with vanilla, you're in for the win. So there you have it. There's my overview of vanilla PMO. 

18:30

I hope that's been helpful. I look forward to hearing your feedback on how you're going. Please reach out to me anytime if you have any questions or if you have had some success in applying some of these ideas. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast. Please share this with someone or rate it if you enjoyed it. Don't forget to follow us on social media and to stay up to date with all things Agile Ideas, go to our website, www.agilemanagementoffice.com. I hope you've been able to learn, feel or be inspired today. Until next time, what's your Agile Idea?