Chiara, honest question first: was this shift something leadership pushed for, or did it start from within your PMO?

I ask because in my experience those two paths lead to very different outcomes. When leadership pulls you into a more strategic role it tends to stick. When the PMO itself decides to reinvent its positioning without that pull, it often meets quiet resistance.

My honest view is that the shift from process police to strategic partner is real, but somewhat overstated as a universal aspiration. Not every organisation needs a strategic PMO. Some are genuinely well served by a PMO that keeps the machine running consistently and quietly. The pressure to be strategic sometimes comes from within the PMO function itself rather than from genuine organisational need.

Where I do agree with you: the PMO should at minimum not be a barrier. Being a process enforcer who slows things down without adding clarity is indefensible. But jumping from there to portfolio strategist is a large step, and I think many PMOs oversell their readiness for it.

This is a very relevant topic for me as someone relatively new here. I want to offer a perspective from a different context.

In my organisation in Zimbabwe, we never started by positioning the PMO as a compliance function. We started small and focused almost entirely on being useful, visible and fast to respond. I think if we had led with governance and process we would have been shut down within a year.

I am not sure the police versus partner framing applies equally everywhere. In many organisations I know on this continent, the PMO lives or dies based on whether key people feel it helps their live easier or harder. Strategic positioning is a luxury you earn. You cannot claim it from the start.

So maybe the question is not how do you shift from police to partner, but how do you avoid becoming the police in the first place while still doing what governance requires?

Dimitrios, to answer your question: it was a mix of both. Leadership started asking questions we were not positioned to answer, things like which of our projects are actually creating value, and where should we stop investing. Our reporting gave them status but not insight. That gap is what made us realise we needed to change.

But Thandiwe, your framing challenges me a little. You are right that the police label is something that gets applied from outside, not chosen from within. We did not decide to be process police. We became it gradually because we prioritised consistency over relationship. Every checklist we added made sense in isolation. Together they built a wall.

I think the real question is whether there is a path that avoids both traps: the PMO that enforces too rigidly, and the PMO that is so soft it has no credibility when it needs to hold a line. How do you build that balance?

Chiara, I think you have identified the real issue but I would frame it differently. You say you became process police gradually because you prioritised consistency. I would argue the problem is not consistency itself but the way PMOs tend to add without ever removing. Every process gets added for a good reason and then stays forever. Nobody ever asks which of our governance steps is no longer earning its cost.

The PMOs I have seen make the strategic shift successfully were ones that were willing to kill their own processes. Not just streamline them. Actually retire them. That takes a kind of institutional courage that is uncomfortable because those processes represent work and history and sometimes the identity of people who built them.

I would be curious to know: when you made your shift, what did you stop doing? I suspect the answer to that question tells you more then the new things you started.

Dimitrios, this point about retiring processes is one I feel strongly about and I am glad you raised it.

In our PMO we do a process review every six months specifically to ask that question. We call it a pruning round. It is deliberately informal, we sit with the project managers and ask them which of our requirements are adding friction without adding value. They are usually very honest when they feel safe to be.

We have removed three major governance steps in two years this way. Each time there was internal resistance from someone who owned that step. But in all three cases, nothing bad happened when we removed it. Projects did not fall apart. Stakeholders did not lose visibility. The step had been protecting against a risk that no longer existed or had never been the actual risk in the first place.

I think this is also what Chiara is pointing at, that the shift is not just about adding strategic activities but about creating space for them by removing things that are filling your calendar but not filling any real need.

Dimitrios, you asked what we stopped doing. It is a good question and slightly uncomfortable to answer honestly.

We stopped the monthly written progress reports for projects under a certain threshold of complexity. They were consuming around 40 percent of our capacity and almost nobody read them. We replaced them with a short visual summary that the project lead updates directly in our portfolio tool. It took three months for people to stop asking where there monthly report was, and then they stopped asking.

We also stopped running the project health review in the format it had been running. It had become a performance in which project managers read slides at us rather then a genuine risk conversation. We made it a standing meeting with no slides, just questions. Attendance improved and the quality of information we got from it improved significantly.

Thandiwe, your pruning round is exactly the right instinct. I wish we had formalised it the way you have rather then waiting until the weight of the process became impossible to ignore.

OK, my earlier scepticism was partly unfair. The distinction I was missing: the version of "strategic partner" I was reacting to is the PMO that wants status without doing anything differently to earn it. The version Chiara and Thandiwe are describing is the one that earns influence by removing friction. Those are quite different things.

The pruning round and the meeting format change are both examples of the second. Not about the PMO's position. Just about doing the job better.

I'm still not convinced the police-versus-partner framing is all that useful though. It centres the PMO. The more productive question might be: is the organisation managing its portfolio well? If not, what would actually help? The answer might or might not involve a more strategic PMO.

Dimitrios, that reframe is very useful and I think it gets to the heart of it.

When I talk to other PMO professionals in my network, the ones who are struggling are almost always the ones who are focused on what the PMO deserves or should be recognised for. The ones who are thriving are focused on who in the organisation is making a poor decision because their not getting the right information at the right time, and how the PMO can fix that.

The title and the seat at the table follow from the second approach. They do not come from the first.

I also want to come back to something Chiara said at the start: that there is a path that avoids both traps. I think the path is not a compromise between the two extremes. It is something different entirely. A PMO that is genuinely useful does not need to police because people come to it willingly. And when it occasionally needs to hold a line, it has the credibility to do so without being seen as obstructive.

Thandiwe, that reframe helps. I have been trying to say something similar but had not found the right words.

What I keep coming back to is that in the moments where we get it wrong, it is not usually a philosophy problem. It is that we were under pressure and grabbed the familiar tool. A checklist. A gate. A formal review. Because it is faster in the moment, even if it is worse overall.

The insight that shifted things for me in this thread is Dimitrios's point about retiring processes. We had been adding things slowly over years without noticing the weight. The shift was not declaring ourselves strategic partners. It was stopping some things and seeing what happened.

I am curious whether others have had the experience of slipping back into process-heavy mode, particularly under deadline pressure. That is still our weak point I think.

Something I keep coming back to from this discussion: the organisations that struggle most with PMO value are often the ones where the PMO and leadership have a transactional relationship. The PMO delivers reports, leadership receives them, nobody talks about what actually matters. The ones that seem to work are almost always ones where someone in the PMO invested in individual relationships before any formal structure existed.

What I have not fully resolved though: how do you hold onto that when the person who built those relationships moves on? In my experience the trust rarely transfers cleanly to the next person, even if the processes and role titles stay the same.