Webinar: Delivering Value at Scale: What High‑Performing PMO Leaders Do Differently

PMOs have never been more scrutinised but not for the reason most people assume. The problem isn't that PMOs lack visibility. Leaders see their PMOs clearly. The real issue is a structural misalignment in expectations: executives want strategic partners who can answer "Are we investing in the right things?" and "Are we adapting fast enough?"  while PMOs are still largely structured, measured, and resourced as operational delivery engines. Worse, this gap is self-reinforcing: PMOs tend to define their own value in isolation, while executives rarely take the time to articulate what they actually need. The result is two functions operating in the same organisation with fundamentally different assumptions about what success looks like.

In this webinar, Planisware brought together three expert PMO minds in the field to help us understand: Heba Al Shehhi, Head PMO at Dubai Municipality and author of Elements of Leadership; Dr. Frederic Casagrande, VP and Global Strategic Leader at TAQA Distribution; and Engineer Rwdah Al-Subaiey, founder of Techpreneur and former Enterprise PMO leader at Qatar Energy and Ooredoo. Together, they unpack what truly separates high-performing PMO leaders from the rest and how closing that expectations gap is the defining challenge of the modern PMO.

Why the PMO Exists And Why That Still Matters

The PMO did not emerge from a boardroom decision. It emerged from necessity. As Heba Al Shehhi explained, the function existed long before anyone called it a PMO:

"Leadership needed visibility, projects needed coordination, organisations needed someone who can connect the dots — connect all of these moving parts in the project. And over time, that function evolved." — Heba Al Shehhi, Head PMO, Dubai Municipality

What began as a coordination and reporting function gradually matured into something far more consequential. Think about the early days of large infrastructure programmes or government initiatives, someone had to sit above the individual project managers, spot the patterns, catch the recurring risks, and give leadership a coherent picture of what was happening across dozens of moving parts. That someone became the PMO. PMOs today set standards, enforce governance, build capability, and, at their best, drive organisational value at the portfolio level.

Yet despite decades of evolution, many PMOs still find themselves caught between two worlds: expected to handle operational rigour while simultaneously being asked to contribute at a strategic level without always being given the mandate, access, or tools to do both well. This tension is not a sign of PMO failure. It is a sign that the conversation between PMOs and their organisations has not kept pace with the ambition.

This evolution does not happen automatically. It requires a deliberate shift in mindset, operating model, and in how PMOs engage with the leadership they serve.

From Delivery Engine to Strategic Partner

The defining question for modern PMOs, according to Rwdah Al-Subaiey, is deceptively simple:

"The moment a PMO stops asking 'Are we on track?' and starts asking 'Are we on the right track?' — that is the moment it becomes truly strategic." — Rwdah Al-Subaiey, Founder, Techpreneur

Rwdah illustrated this with a real example from her own career: noticing a gap in AI-related initiatives within a company whose stated strategic objective was digital leadership. Rather than waiting for direction, her PMO proposed establishing an AI Centre of Excellence, not as an IT initiative, but as a portfolio-level capability. That shift, from managing projects to shaping strategy, is exactly what separates high-performing PMOs.

It is a shift that sounds logical but is often harder to execute than it appears. PMOs that have spent years building credibility through operational rigour — on-time delivery, clean governance, well-maintained registers- can face internal resistance when they begin to step into strategic territory. Business units may see it as overreach. Leadership may not yet have framed the PMO as a strategic function. The path forward requires PMO leaders to be proactive, to build relationships across the organisation, and to demonstrate strategic value incrementally, not all at once.

The key transitions Rwdah identified:
•   Moving focus from delivery to the right investment
•   Enabling faster, better decisions for leadership
•   Continuously asking whether projects are creating the value the business requires
•   Transitioning from cost centre to business enabler

This is precisely the shift that platforms like Planisware are designed to support. When a PMO has a unified, AI-powered view of the entire portfolio — mapping projects to strategic objectives, surfacing misalignment in real time, and enabling proactive prioritisation decisions — the conversation with leadership changes. The PMO stops bringing status updates and starts bringing strategic insight.

Redefining PMO Value And Who Gets to Define It

One of the most thought-provoking moments of the webinar came when the question of PMO value was put to Dr. Frederic Casagrande. His answer challenged a common assumption:

"Unfortunately, consistently over the past couple of decades, I've seen PMO leaders trying to self-answer that question rather than asking that question to their customer. The value of the PMO is whatever your customer desires as an outcome from your PMO." — Dr. Frederic Casagrande, VP & Global Strategic Leader, TAQA Distribution

This reframing is critical. PMOs that define their own value in isolation, through compliance metrics, project delivery rates, or beautifully formatted dashboards, risk becoming irrelevant to the very executives they serve. The real question is: what does the CEO, the business unit head, or the portfolio owner actually need?

The challenge is structural. PMO leaders are often so immersed in day-to-day operational demands that carving out time to have those strategic conversations with leadership feels like a luxury. Yet without that dialogue, the gap widens. The PMO optimises for what it knows, and leadership grows frustrated by what it is not getting. The answer is not to work harder on reporting, it is to build the mechanisms that make feedback and alignment a regular part of how the PMO operates.

Fred was equally direct on what measuring PMO performance should actually look like beyond the classic on-time, on-budget metrics:

"There are metrics that measure the performance of the portfolio — resource allocation and utilisation, the percentage of strategic drivers actually being delivered compared to the strategic plan, and the satisfaction of the customer. At least on a periodic basis — quarterly, six-monthly, or yearly — we need to understand what's the level of satisfaction from our organisation with regards to the services we are offering." — Dr. Frederic Casagrande

What C-Level Executives Actually Expect

The audience for this webinar was itself a telling signal: project managers, PMO leaders, and C-level executives all registered in significant numbers. The fact that executives showed up in force for a conversation about PMO evolution speaks to how much this topic has moved up the organisational agenda. The question of executive expectations is one that all three guests addressed with unusual candour.

Rwdah Al-Subaiey was direct about the gap between what PMOs typically produce and what leadership actually wants:

"Being in meetings with executives, I noticed they don't really care about the perfect template and the beautiful Gantt charts. What they care about is answers to simple but important questions: Are we investing in the right thing? Are we adapting fast enough? Are our projects even moving the needle towards this strategy?" — Rwdah Al-Subaiey

This is not a new observation but it remains persistently unaddressed. Part of the reason is cultural: PMOs are trained and evaluated on process rigour, and shifting to outcome-driven communication requires both a different skill set and a different kind of confidence in the room with leadership. The PMO leaders who make that transition successfully are those who learn to speak the language of business impact, not project management.

Her summary of what C-level executives expect from a strategic PMO:
•   Strategic alignment ensuring projects and investments are directly tied to business strategy
•   Faster decision-making enabling leadership to accelerate, pivot, or kill initiatives in real time
•   Early risk identification not just at the project level, but at the organisational and operational level
•   Value realisation verifying that the outcomes promised in the business case are actually being achieved

Delivering on these expectations consistently requires more than skilled people, it requires the right infrastructure. Planisware's executive dashboards and portfolio analytics are built around exactly these questions, surfacing real-time insights on strategic alignment, resource utilisation, risk exposure, and portfolio health. When PMO teams are freed from manually aggregating reports, they can redirect that time toward the strategic conversations that actually move the needle with leadership.

The Name Debate: PMO, VPMO, EPMO… Does It Matter?

The webinar touched on the proliferation of PMO naming conventions (EPMO, SPMO, VMO, TMO) and what, if anything, they signal. It is a topic that generates strong opinions in the field, and for good reason: naming is often used as a proxy for transformation when the underlying operating model has not changed at all.

Heba Al Shehhi offered a grounded perspective:

"It's not about what we call the PMO. It's about how the PMO helps shape the organisational direction and enable strategic outcomes — and meets the requirement of your stakeholders, internal and external. If you change the name but don't change the mindset or the operating model, it's useless. It doesn't show maturity — it's exactly the opposite." — Heba Al Shehhi

This is a point worth sitting with. Renaming a PMO as a Value Management Office or a Strategic Portfolio Office creates expectations and if the team behind the new name is still operating with the same processes, the same reporting cadence, and the same arm's-length relationship with leadership, the rebranding quickly becomes a liability rather than an asset.

What truly differentiates a high-performing PMO, in Heba's experience, is how it integrates with other organisational functions — from strategy and finance to innovation, knowledge management, and enterprise agility. At Dubai Municipality, this integration was not aspirational; it was operationalised through cross-functional committees and formalised collaboration with departments that PMOs rarely engage with. The name never drove that transformation. The operating model did.

Giving PMOs a Voice in Project Selection

A question from the live audience: "How do you involve PMOs and project managers in project selection when they're just handed projects to execute?", resonated deeply with participants. It surfaces one of the most common frustrations in the field: PMOs are held accountable for project outcomes but are excluded from the decisions that shape the portfolio in the first place.

Heba's answer was structural:

"We suggested having a project approval committee with different members — the PMO for dependency and duplication visibility, but also finance, strategy, customer happiness. The business needs to be involved. It should not be the responsibility of the PMO by itself to get involved in project selection." — Heba Al Shehhi

This multi-stakeholder governance model ensures that project selection is not siloed in one function, and that the PMO's unique cross-portfolio visibility is used as a contribution and not a burden. It also shifts the PMO's position in the organisation from reactive executor to active participant in shaping what gets done.

Getting there requires both the right governance structure and the right data. When project intake, scoring criteria, and portfolio-level impact analysis are centralised in a single platform, as they are in Planisware, the PMO can walk into a selection committee with objective, comparable evidence rather than subjective advocacy. That changes the quality of the conversation and the credibility of the PMO within it.

The Thread That Runs Through It All

Across every topic discussed in this webinar, from PMO origins to executive expectations to naming conventions, one theme was constant: value. Not value as a slogan, but value as something demonstrated, measured, and aligned to what the organisation actually needs.

High-performing PMO leaders share one trait: they stop defining value for themselves and start discovering it through dialogue with the people they serve. They move from reporting on projects to shaping portfolios. They move from cost centres to business enablers. They build the governance structures, the cross-functional relationships, and the feedback mechanisms that keep their PMO anchored to what leadership actually needs and, most importantly, not what the PMO assumes it needs.

That kind of transformation is both a leadership challenge and a capability challenge. And it is one that Planisware works alongside our customers to address every day with a platform built to connect strategy to execution, and to give every level of the organisation, from project manager to CEO, the clarity they need to make better decisions.

Want to explore how Planisware can help your PMO deliver value at scale? Get in touch with us here.