PMI’s latest research asked PMOs who their primary stakeholders are. The answers point to a question the industry has been dancing around for years.
The Research That Surprised Me (And Shouldn’t Have)
PMI’s 2025 PMO Strategic Partners Report asked nearly 2,000 leaders a simple question: Who does the PMO primarily serve?
- 63% of PMO leaders named C-suite leadership.
- Project managers tied at 63%.
- Functional managers and teams came in at 53%.
- Project team members — the people doing the actual work — landed at just 45%.
I have to admit these results surprised me. But they shouldn’t have.
There’s been a lot of discussion lately about how much time PMOs spend building reports for executives (and what happens to that time when AI takes over).
It’s a fair question. But it’s not the interesting one.
This research points to a juicier question: Who are PMOs really for?
Mission Statements Don’t Answer This. Calendars Do.
It’s a question worth pausing on, because most PMOs have never examined the answer honestly.
Some PMOs do have mission statements. They say things like “we enable strategic execution across the enterprise” or “we drive project delivery excellence.” Fine. But mission statements rarely reveal the truth.
The way we spend our time does.
Who you call back first. Which meeting you prep hardest for. What you spend your Thursday afternoon building. Whether you spend two hours making a dashboard pixel-perfect for a steering committee or two hours helping a business unit understand what’s about to land in their department.
Those micro-decisions — made dozens of times a week, mostly without much thought — are the real answer to “who is this PMO for?”
And once you start paying attention to the pattern, the PMI data stops being surprising.
The Totally Rational Reason PMOs Can’t Stop Staring at the C-Suite
I want to be fair here, because this isn’t a story about PMO directors making bad choices. The logic is completely rational: executives built the PMO, executives fund the PMO, and executives can kill the PMO. Orienting toward them is self-preservation. I get it.
Then layer on the mechanics. Executives have asked for XYZ reports on XYZ timetable. Each one takes two hours to prepare. When two stakeholders need your attention at the same time, and one of them is a VP…who are you calling first?
And here’s the part executives rarely see: when they ask for something, it takes 2–3x longer than they think it will. Because everyone’s trying to make it perfect.
At large organizations, a single status report might go through three or four layers of massaging before it reaches the C-suite. Three or four rounds of people wordsmithing a document so it says the right thing the right way. That’s hours spent polishing a description of the work instead of doing the work.
Nobody sits down and decides “we exist for the C-suite.” But loss aversion, logistics, and urgency all pull in the same direction. And over time, the balance tips from working on the thing to talking about working on the thing.
So Who’s Getting Shortchanged?
While PMOs are oriented upward, there’s a whole stakeholder group that’s deprioritized. The middle.
Cross-functional leaders. Business sponsors. The departments that projects actually land in.
These are the people who have to absorb the change, free up staff, adapt their workflows, and deal with the fallout when things go sideways. They’re where projects succeed or fail. And most PMOs interact with them only when a deliverable is due or when somebody needs their signature.
When executives bring me in, it’s often because they’re hearing frustration from the middle that things aren’t working. The middle is the neglected stakeholder — overlooked because the PMO is busy making sure the people who built it don’t regret building it.
And this points to a distinction I think most PMOs haven’t made. There’s a difference between stakeholders of the project and stakeholders of the PMO. Every PMO thinks about project-level stakeholder management. Almost none of them ask: who does this PMO itself serve as an organizational function? (Beyond, you know, the people who can shut us down.)
Here’s the Irony: The Executives Get It
Remember that PMI survey? There’s a second finding that makes the first one sting a little more:
When senior leaders were asked where PMOs should allocate resources, customer relationship management ranked 4th. When PMO leaders were asked where they actually allocate resources…10th. A 25-point gap.
The executives—the very people PMOs are bending over backward to serve—are saying: we want you to build stronger relationships across the organization.
The PMOs aren’t hearing it. They’re too busy prepping the board deck.
*Note: “Customer Relationship Management” is defined in this report as “Building and maintaining strong internal and/or external customer relationships and responding to changes in needs.”
What It Would Take to Actually Shift This
Most PMOs I work with spend roughly 75% of their time running projects, 20% reporting, and 5% working in the middle. And that 5% is almost entirely reactive (i.e., handling stakeholders when a task needs their immediate attention).
I’d like to see something closer to 75–80% running projects, 10% formal reporting, and 10–15% proactively managing middle stakeholders at a portfolio level.
That means making sure business stakeholders know well in advance when they’ll be needed. It means building relationships with your sponsor’s peers (because sponsors change, and you don’t want to start from scratch). It means giving cross-functional leaders action-oriented updates (key decisions made, key decisions yet to make, what’s coming in the next two and six weeks) with similar regularity you give the C-suite.
But here’s the thing: this can’t be a unilateral move. It requires an honest conversation with the executive team about what they’re willing to trade.
I once helped a financial institution shift to a model where more decisions were pushed to the middle, and reporting moved from activity-based (“here’s what we did this month”) to outcome-based (“here’s what changed for the business”). Before we started, I told the leadership team:
“You have one last chance to change your mind before we introduce significant change here. This is going to be uncomfortable. You might feel like you’re getting less of the white-glove treatment. But the trade-off is you’ll see projects that have been stalled for months coming off the backlog and deploying with fewer errors. Are you willing to trade comfort for velocity?”
They were. And we got those results.
The CEO (In Perspective)
The executive team is a stakeholder. Not the only customer. Getting this right doesn’t mean abandoning executive reporting. It means shrinking the footprint and investing the freed-up time in the people who determine whether projects actually succeed.
Because when the middle is well-served—when cross-functional leaders feel informed, when sponsors are engaged early, when impacted teams aren’t blindsided—the executive reports get better too. The projects actually move.
Serve the middle, and the top gets happier too.
If You Only Do One Thing
Pick one active project and identify the cross-functional leaders who are affected by it. Set up a 20-minute face-to-face (or virtual) check-in with each of them (or ask the PM to). Ask:
“What do you wish you knew about this project that nobody’s telling you?”
Their answers will tell you exactly where the gap is.