When an organization wants stronger execution, the instinct is to pull more projects under the PMO’s umbrella. But “domesticating” side projects carries consequences nobody budgets for. Is it possible that the strongest PMOs deliberately choose to leave some projects wild?
Something I’ve noticed. Convincing leadership to give a PMO its second project manager is a nearly impossible sell. The conventional wisdom says one person should be able to “keep tabs on” 10-20 projects. (They can’t.) Every hire after that one gets interrogated.
But once a PMO crosses a certain threshold, the interrogation stops. Adding project managers turns into simple math. Three new projects, one new PM. And the organization keeps adding projects, because it gets hooked on the visibility and sense of control that a PMO delivers.
The real enemy in a large PMO isn’t headcount (usually). It’s feral projects: the efforts nobody knows launched, nobody is officially running, nobody is reporting on, and nobody sees coming when they go live.
No matter how hard a company tries to get its arms around what’s happening across the organization, feral projects slip through anyway. Departments organically spin up efforts, sometimes partnering with two or three others. Unofficial PMs run the work. And when the effort surfaces, the response is automatic: fold it into the PMO report.
So the PMO ramps up the pressure to centralize. More gating processes, mandatory business cases, reporting oversight for anything that moves. The instinct is entirely rational. Whether it strengthens the PMO is a different question.
Why can’t PMOs resist the urge to centralize?
When PMO leaders describe wanting a “stronger” PMO, they nearly always mean one thing: more centralized, more significant project work in the portfolio, a bigger staff of professional project managers. Strength equals size, scope, and grip.
That’s the trade a growing portfolio makes: the bigger the PMO gets, the less it knows about more.
It’s a seductive logic. A larger portfolio hands the PMO visibility into resource conflicts, dependencies, and risks it couldn’t spot before. Professional PMs raise the bar on execution quality. And one governance process gives leadership a single, clear picture of the whole portfolio.
Except that every one of those benefits depends on attention, and attention doesn’t scale with the portfolio. A PMO can’t expand forever. Past a certain point, its focus stretches too thin, its speed drops too low, its stakeholder management grows too shallow, and its reporting turns superficial.
That’s the trade a growing portfolio makes: the bigger the PMO gets, the less it knows about more.
Domesticating feral projects has a real ROI. Until it doesn’t.
Years ago, I had a client who brought me in to examine how they approved and prioritized projects. A team of 12 cross-functional leaders was spending 90 minutes every week reviewing and approving (and hardly ever rejecting) project proposals.
Here’s the backstory. Two years earlier, the executive team had launched a tool that let anyone in the company submit a project proposal — the goal being to lower barriers to front-line innovation. The PMO classified any request over 50 person-hours as a project; those proposals went before a committee to approve a feasibility study. If the study passed, the proposal went back to the committee to greenlight.
When I arrived, they had more than 100 untouched projects sitting in the backlog, at least a quarter of which had been there 18 months or longer. The feasibility studies alone were consuming resources from the very people who were supposed to be executing approved work.
With so many projects dead by default, business leaders started running their own projects under the radar, conveniently claiming they fell under 50 hours. (They didn’t.)
So engineers, developers, and other “doers” were hit three ways: feasibility studies, approved work, and under-the-table work. The centralizing machinery designed to capture innovation and track progress had produced exactly the bureaucratic nightmare the leadership team had been trying to dismantle.
And the PMO was so busy running the process, running the work, and building capacity that it couldn’t do any of them well.
Project “wildlife” has real value. We just stop seeing it.
That case study reveals something else worth noting about feral projects: there’s a solid business reason they keep proliferating.
Portfolio projects are typically decided a year or more ahead of time. They can be high-impact, but they’re slow to get moving and slow to materialize.
Meanwhile, deep in the organization, urgent needs and short-lived innovation opportunities don’t wait for intake cycles. A market window won’t hold for 12 months while a committee deliberates. An AI integration in a revenue-generating area can’t always wait for IT to settle on the org-wide strategy.
PMOs struggle to recognize that value because the projects producing it don’t look like projects. They have no charter, no official sponsor, no status report. They look like chaos. But some of that chaos is the organization adapting faster than its formal processes can keep up.
And then there’s a cultural complication. We hire Directors, VPs, and SVPs to make real decisions about how best to pursue business goals. Hitting those goals depends heavily on their ability to move with speed. So when we tell them that anything over 50 hours requires a project plan and a steering committee, we’re trying to cage a project that only thrives when it’s allowed to run free.
What most PMOs need is a “nature preserve.”
Most organizations are trapped in a binary: either domesticate a project by pulling it into the PMO, or let feral projects gnaw at resources better spent on big priorities.
I think what most PMOs actually need is a nature preserve — a deliberate strategy for supporting project wildlife that can’t (and shouldn’t) be caged. Like a real preserve, it comes down to two things: where its edges are, and an environment where inhabitants can thrive. Here’s how it works:
The edges are drawn by the PMO portfolio. Plenty of strategies exist for deciding what a PMO should run, and some of them work. However you arrive at it, the portfolio decision is the fence: whatever doesn’t make the cut, or surfaces outside the planning cycle, lives in the preserve. If you can’t support your defined priorities, sequence them to limit work-in-progress, find the budget to grow, or demote them to the preserve.
The fence protects the portfolio, not just the preserve. When a portfolio project has critical-path work or a planned go-live affecting the same stakeholders as preserve projects, the PMO project is the immovable constraint and unquestioned priority. Preserve projects roam around the portfolio, never the reverse. That’s the one standing rule, and it captures the whole point: freedom, but not interference.
A thriving environment starts with knowing where the hard limits are. Preserve projects are mostly run by accidental PMs and inexperienced sponsors, and the largest governance risk is a rule the team was never told about. So the PMO publishes and communicates every non-negotiable organizational rule that still applies to work it isn’t running.
The PMO doesn’t monitor or enforce those rules, though. Say there’s an organizational policy that IT compliance has to vet new tools before anyone buys them. IT is the cop. The PMO is the attorney advising the client: here’s where the rules are, here’s how to find them.
The PMO builds a healthy preserve by teaching inhabitants what good work looks like. The PMO shares, teaches, and coaches principles, not processes and stage gates. Principles like:
- A strong project names the person who will run it.
- A strong project knows when it’s over.
- A strong project understands who it impacts.
Rules and principles are worded differently on purpose. Rules read as boundaries. Principles read as descriptions of good work. People follow principles that get them results.
The last piece of the environment is support, and it isn’t optional. You can’t house giraffes in a marsh, and you can’t expect projects to thrive without the coaching, templates, and shared tools that make a preserve livable. The PMO provides all of it as a resource, even when it isn’t governing the work.
A PMO that declares a preserve but offers no principles or resources hasn’t built one. It has simply stopped paying attention.
Without a preserve strategy, PMOs become the machine people route around. AI makes that worse.
Departments will chase their priorities regardless. AI is making it faster to do so.
IT departments are already discovering that when they can’t move fast enough to put the right tools in front of the organization, people go and get personal ChatGPT accounts and use whatever non-approved tool they can find. The shadow AI infrastructure grows more dangerous than anything IT was trying to prevent.
I think the same dynamic is coming for PMOs without a preserve strategy (something I explored in Are PMOs Dying?). If the choice is “submit my project to a PMO machine that doesn’t have the time or resources to move fast” or “do it under the radar,” it’s going to be under the radar every time.
A PMO that doesn’t want to be seen as the slow machine has to get leaner: a tighter portfolio run by top-tier PMs, and a preserve that gives the rest of the organization room to move.
If You Only Do One Thing
The next time your PMO is tempted to domesticate feral work, ask: “In what ways would adding this project compromise the rest of them?” If it’s clear you can’t take it on, use that as a test case to design your preserve.