The Soundtrack of Stagnation
The projector fan is whirring like a dying hornet, a sound that has become the soundtrack to my 16th meeting of the week. Marcus, our Senior PMO Lead-a man whose PMP certification is framed in a way that catches the glare of the overhead LEDs-is currently hovering a laser pointer over a spreadsheet that contains 236 individual rows of ‘Pre-Execution Readiness Indicators.’ I’m sitting in the back, leaning my head just enough to the left to look like I’m intensely focused on the screen, while actually I’m just trying to stay awake after a lunch that was 46% more sodium than any human should consume. This is the ritual. This is the dance of the Project Management Office, a department that has successfully convinced the C-suite that if you describe a problem in 56 different fields, the problem somehow solves itself through the sheer weight of the documentation.
We are here because the new ‘Project Launch Template’ was released this morning. It arrived in our inboxes at 8:06 AM like a digital brick. It requires us to define our ‘interdependency mitigation strategy’ before we’ve even decided what the product is actually supposed to do.
The Process as a Shield
There is a fundamental lie at the heart of the modern PMO. We are told it exists to create ‘repeatable success’ and ‘governance.’ But if you look at the 66 projects we’ve launched in the last 2016 days, the ones that succeeded weren’t the ones that followed the 56-field template. They were the ones where a few smart people ignored the PMO, went into a room, and actually built something before the bureaucracy noticed they were missing.
The PMO doesn’t create success; it creates a paper trail that protects senior management from the fallout of failure. If a project dies, the VP can point to the ‘Project Health Dashboard’ and say, ‘Look, we followed the process.’ The process becomes the shield. If you follow the process and fail, you’re safe. If you ignore the process and succeed, you’re a liability because you’ve proven the process is unnecessary. It’s a classic Catch-26 of corporate life.
[The ritual of the ritual is the only thing that survives.]
This statement encapsulates the self-perpetuating nature of process adherence over actual output.
The Cost of Justification
Ben K.L. calls it ‘Bureaucratic Friction.’ When you ask an expert-someone who has spent 16 years mastering their craft-to justify every 6-minute interval of their day to a person who doesn’t know the difference between a backend API and a toaster, you aren’t just slowing them down. You are insulting their soul.
Departmental Impact Snapshot
The PMO centralizes control in the hands of the process-keepers, the people whose only skill is the ability to navigate the very labyrinth they helped build. It’s a self-sustaining ecosystem. The budget for this department alone is $896,000 a year, yet they haven’t produced a single line of revenue-generating code since the company was founded.
Omissions and Risk Profiles
I once tried to point this out in a ‘Continuous Improvement’ workshop. I suggested that we reduce the 56 fields to 6 essential ones. The silence in the room was so thick you could have carved it with a letter opener. To them, the fields aren’t just data points; they are the walls of their fortress. They argued that ‘omitting even one field could lead to a 16% increase in risk profile.’ They made that number up, of course.
Ben K.L. and I have a game we play during these sessions. We count how many times Marcus uses the word ‘synergy’ or ‘guardrails.’ Today, he’s hit 26 ‘guardrails’ before we even reached the break. The guardrails are everywhere. They are so close together that there’s no room for the road.
The Cost of Compliance
Waits for the form.
Moves forward.
When you tell people they can’t move without filling out a form, they eventually stop trying to move.
The Tragedy of the Empty Gantt Chart
It’s the tragedy of the empty Gantt chart. We spend weeks building these beautiful, cascading waterfalls of tasks, knowing full well that the moment reality hits, the chart will be useless. But we update it anyway. We update it daily, because Marcus says it’s ‘mission critical.’
Original State
Aesthetically Balanced
Digital Painting
I’ve seen Ben K.L. spend 46 minutes adjusting the length of a bar on a chart just so it would look ‘aesthetically balanced’ for the Friday review. This is what we have become: highly paid digital painters, color-coding our own stagnation.
We have mistaken the map for the territory, and now we are lost in the ink.
A profound conclusion reached at 4:56 PM.
Driving Without a Template
The meeting finally ends at 4:56 PM. Marcus looks satisfied. We walk out into the hallway, a group of 16 tired adults who have accomplished absolutely nothing today except the validation of a template. I think about the 56 fields waiting for me in my inbox. I think about the ‘interdependency mitigation strategy’ I have to invent for a project that doesn’t even have a budget yet.
I realize that the PMO isn’t there to manage projects; it’s there to manage us. It’s a containment system for human unpredictability. It’s an attempt to turn the messy, chaotic, beautiful process of creation into a predictable factory line, forgetting that you can’t mass-produce a soul.
Getting in and driving away.
Some things are better handled without a template.