A full diagnostic of your execution system.
Where strategy stalls, the cause is rarely the people. It is the environment — the invisible friction built into how decisions get made, how work flows, and what behaviors the system quietly rewards.
The Momentum Map is a structured audit built around the Star Model — the organizational design framework The Persimmon Group uses with clients to examine the six interconnected dimensions that shape how work actually gets done. Unlike diagnostic tools that focus on individual projects or single failure points, the Momentum Map looks at the whole system.
Every organization has an official version of how work flows and an unofficial one. The official version lives in process documentation, org charts, and project plans. The unofficial version is how work actually moves — through relationships, workarounds, shadow processes, and informal norms that no one has written down. The Momentum Map surfaces the gap between the two.
Momentum doesn't come from working harder. It comes from removing the drag. It returns when working the right way feels simpler, safer, and clearly worth the effort.
The diagnostic applies at any scale: a single team executing a transformation initiative, a PMO portfolio spanning multiple workstreams, or an enterprise-wide operating model change. The six dimensions stay constant. The subject of the diagnosis changes.
Leaders who notice that effort and results aren't proportional.
The Momentum Map is designed for people responsible for execution at scale who suspect the friction in their organization is systemic, not individual. It can be run alone as a private audit or used to facilitate a structured leadership conversation. The questions surface the same issues either way.
Not a quiz with a score. A diagnostic with a direction.
Each of the six dimensions includes three diagnostic questions and one short exercise. The questions are designed to be answered from the inside — not as a theoretical assessment of how the system should work, but as an honest account of how it actually works on a regular Tuesday.
Three Ground Rules
- Answer from the work, not the org chart.The honest answer almost always lives in the gap between what strategy assumes and what a Tuesday afternoon actually feels like for the person doing the work.
- Work all six dimensions before drawing conclusions.Execution drag rarely lives in one place. The pattern across dimensions is usually more revealing than any single answer.
- Look for the issue that shows up twice.Where the same underlying problem — a clarity problem, a safety problem, a friction problem — appears in more than one dimension, that is where the real work lives.
You have the signal. Now find the source.
If you have already run the VES Framework diagnostic, you know which of the three conditions is producing the behavior gap in your organization — the work does not feel valuable, it is not easy enough to do, or it does not feel safe. VES is designed to surface that signal quickly.
The Momentum Map is the next step. Knowing which filter is broken tells you what is wrong. The Momentum Map examines the six underlying dimensions of the execution system to tell you why — and what would have to change for the environment to start producing different behavior.
VES identifies the signal. A targeted test that tells an organization which environmental condition is broken and where to focus.
The Momentum Map finds its source. Once VES has surfaced a signal, the six dimensions of the Momentum Map examine why the answer to one of the VES questions is no — and what systemic changes would address the root cause rather than the symptom.
If you have not yet run VES, it is worth starting there before working through the Momentum Map. VES takes significantly less time and will tell you which dimensions of this diagnostic to focus on first. Read the VES Framework →
Six dimensions. Three questions each. One exercise to make it real.
Click through each dimension to see how the diagnostic works. The questions are deliberately blunt. The exercises are short — the kind a leadership team can run in a working session, not a six-month assessment.
The execution system, dimension by dimension.
Each dimension is a different lens on the same system. Same Tuesday, different angle. Start with Strategy or jump to wherever you suspect the drag lives.
Is it clear what we are solving for?
Strategy gets buried under corporate language — words like optimized, world-class, and streamlined that sound compelling in a presentation but don't help a project manager make a decision on a Tuesday afternoon. When three VPs define success differently, speed is the first casualty.
The Momentum Map treats strategic clarity not as a communications problem but as an execution infrastructure problem. Ambiguous strategy doesn't just slow decisions — it makes the right behavior genuinely harder to choose than the wrong one.
- Can project leads explain the strategic purpose of their work in plain English — without "on time, in scope, on budget"?
- Do all stakeholders actually agree on how success will be measured, or are they nodding in the meeting and interpreting differently afterward?
- Can the team name the top five priorities in the portfolio — and if asked to rank them independently, would the order match?
What is normal here — and is it working?
Culture isn't the values statement on the website. Culture is what happens when the leader leaves the room. It's the micro-decisions people make every day about how to handle bad news, whether to flag a risk, and whether it's safe to say "I don't think this timeline is realistic" — or safer to smile, agree, and plan to miss the date later.
Organizations that reward caution get paralysis. Organizations that punish the messenger get silence. Neither is compatible with fast execution. Culture is a hard constraint on execution speed — one that governance and process improvements cannot override.
- What behavior actually gets rewarded here — and does it match what the organization says it values?
- When a project fails or a deadline is missed, does the team get curious about root causes, or do they get blamed?
- What would a new hire learn in their first 90 days that isn't written in any handbook?
How does work actually flow?
Most organizations run on a combination of legacy habits, shadow processes, and individual heroics. Work moves not because the system carries it but because someone is constantly nudging it, emailing about it, or calling in favors to get it unstuck. The official flowchart and the actual path work takes rarely match.
The goal isn't a perfect process — they don't exist. The goal is an intentional one. When the workaround is easier than the official path, the workaround will win.
- Can members of the team clearly explain how a decision gets made — who's involved, at what threshold, and how long it should take?
- Where do handoffs or approvals consistently create delays, confusion, or rework?
- Do meetings generate momentum — meaning decisions — or are they primarily status reporting?
Are we organized to execute?
Structure isn't just the org chart. It's the system of decision rights, accountability, and connection that determines whether the right people are talking to each other at the right time. Misaligned structure creates the responsibility void — where everyone is nominally responsible, so no one is actually accountable.
Smart people with good tools and a clear strategy can still produce gridlock if the structure routes decisions through the wrong people. Structure problems are often mistaken for people problems.
- When something strategic slows down, is it immediately clear who has accountability for moving it forward?
- Is the organization structured around how work flows — or around legacy roles and silos that predate the current strategy?
- Where do responsibilities overlap — and does that overlap create useful redundancy, or turf conflicts and confusion?
Do we have the capabilities the system requires?
Execution isn't only about having capable people — it's about having the right capabilities for the specific system being built. When leaders assign work based on availability rather than fit, top performers get punished with an expanding workload until they burn out, while skill gaps go unaddressed because everyone is too occupied managing current fires to build new capacity.
The Momentum Map treats capability as an execution infrastructure question, not a talent management one. The issue isn't whether people are good. The issue is whether the organization has developed the specific skills its execution system requires to function.
- Do we know which critical skills are missing, over-relied on, and which individuals represent single points of dependency? Where would one person's absence stall the work?
- Are we actively developing people to support the future execution system, or just trying to survive today?
- Who is consistently tapped for high-impact work — and who is being overlooked?
Accelerating execution — or adding to the load?
Tools should reduce execution friction. In practice, they often add to it. When a complex project management platform is layered on top of a broken process, the result isn't better project management — it's an expensive problem with a dashboard.
Teams end up working for the tool: spending hours updating systems no one reads, maintaining parallel spreadsheets because they don't trust the official data, and attending meetings whose primary purpose is reconciling information that should have been in one place.
- Do the tools in use reflect how work actually gets done — or how leadership wishes it worked?
- Where are people duplicating effort — maintaining a slide deck and a project tool with the same information, or running shadow processes alongside the official system?
- Which tools are genuinely constrained, and which could be changed or removed if they're creating more friction than value?
Download the Momentum Map diagnostic.
A printable workbook with all six dimensions, the eighteen questions, and the quick exercises — ready to walk through alone or facilitate with your leadership team.
The diagnostic isn't done until you see the pattern.
The Momentum Map isn't about diagnosing failure. It's about surfacing the cracks in the execution system before they become burnout, disengagement, or a missed strategic target. The most powerful interventions are rarely sweeping reorganizations. Usually, one well-placed shift in the system — one decision right clarified, one approval step removed, one norm made visible and changed — unlocks movement that felt impossible the week before.
After completing all six dimensions, look at the notes across the whole diagnostic. Where does the drag concentrate? Most patterns sort into one of these:
When the same underlying issue appears across more than one dimension, that's the leverage point. That's where the diagnostic stops and the design work begins.
What the Momentum Map means for PMOs.
PMOs occupy a unique diagnostic position in most organizations. They see behavior across initiatives rather than inside a single project or team. When one project has a process problem, it might be project-specific. When unclear ownership, surface-level adoption, and stalled decisions show up across the portfolio, the cause is almost always systemic — a structural misalignment, a cultural norm that undermines visibility, or a tools environment that makes the right behavior harder than the workaround.
The Momentum Map is designed for exactly that diagnostic work. Its six dimensions give PMO leaders a structured framework for naming what they are observing across the portfolio — not as a collection of individual project issues, but as a pattern in the execution system that needs to be surfaced to the leaders who hold the levers to change it.
Better change management on every individual initiative won't solve a system problem.
PMO directors are among the few people in any organization who can see execution patterns clearly enough across initiatives to name them at the system level. The Momentum Map turns that observational advantage into a diagnostic that can be brought to the right conversation — with the right leaders, with the evidence to make the case for system-level change rather than better project management on every individual initiative.
Questions about the Momentum Map.
Sara Gallagher.
Sara Gallagher is President of The Persimmon Group and a recognized expert in strategy execution, PMO leadership, and project portfolio management. For more than fifteen years, she has helped organizations — from Fortune 500s to fast-moving startups — bridge the gap between big ambitions and tangible results.
A frequent speaker, author, and instructor, Sara has contributed to publications including PMI.org, CIO Magazine, and PM Playbook, and has delivered international keynotes and whitepapers on strategy execution, organizational change, and high-performing teams. Her consulting portfolio spans energy, finance, manufacturing, pharmaceuticals, and technology.
Sara is the author of Big Dumb Questions, a newsletter for PMO leaders and executives who want to see strategy move off PowerPoint and into the real world.