Is Your PMO Just A Bureaucracy Engine? How To Build One That Drives Real Change
Key Points
PMOs fail when they become rigid, bureaucratic engines that treat strategy execution as a compliance exercise.
Darby Starnes, Vice President of Human Resources at Harding, Shymanski & Company, P.S.C. explains that a more effective PMO must be flexible enough to allow for adaptive, human-centered learning.
She argues that a strong PMO-HR partnership helps answer the “what’s in it for me” question for employees, moving beyond communication to create a genuine desire for change.
Any type of PMO can set strategy and clarify expectations, but it needs to be flexible enough to allow adaptive learning. Otherwise, it becomes a checkbox exercise instead of solving real problems.
Darby Starnes
VP of HR
Harding, Shymanski & Company, P.S.C.
When PMOs are treated as rigid governance engines, project execution can become a compliance exercise rather than a problem-solving function. Such a focus on bureaucratic oversight undermines the goal of driving adaptive, human-centered change, which helps explain why strategy execution often unravels. The answer is an approach that balances strategic goals with the reality of human behavior, creating repeatable and scalable processes by making change feel supportive and safe for employees.
Darby Starnes is Vice President of Human Resources at the accounting firm Harding, Shymanski & Company, P.S.C. With over 15 years of experience and a track record of facilitating more than 800 workshops, she’s a proven organizational development leader. Her deep expertise, including a 12.5-year tenure at TriNet and an OD role with Inflection where she was heavily involved with M&A and IPO planning, positions her as the ideal guide for building a more effective, human-centric PMO.
“Any type of PMO can set strategy and clarify expectations, but it needs to be flexible enough to allow adaptive learning. Otherwise, it becomes a checkbox exercise instead of solving real problems,” says Starnes. She adds that the issue stems from a lack of engaged leadership and warns that a disengaged executive sponsor who isn’t involved in measuring progress can derail projects before they even get off the ground.
Leadership support: Starnes says that without this leadership support, the PMO ceases to be an accountability matrix or a place of resources, becoming instead “a place of dissonance where people don’t want to go to learn and grow.”
Reframing resistance: Starnes says the solution is a more “flattened” structure that helps foster a change-ready culture and a deep understanding of human psychology. Starnes points to the Kübler-Ross model– originally designed for grief- as a surprisingly apt framework, explaining that resistance should be reframed as a predictable and normal part of the transformation process. “People get excited about change, but as soon as it gets uncomfortable, they have a propensity to revert to what’s familiar. That is a normal, human response.”
Champions of change: Starnes says the challenge of employee resistance is best met by building a human support system. “The key is to provide support by putting mechanisms in place, identifying your change champions, and empowering them to keep the work moving forward so people don’t fall back into old patterns of comfort.”
A collaborative partnership between HR and the PMO then emerges as an effective strategy for driving the desire for change. Many successful organizations co-architect change from the start, recognizing the need for a structured change management process, as true adoption often hinges on connecting the “why, what, and how” of a transformation so employees can embrace new behaviors. A focus on the people power of transformations is a key driver of HR digital transformation, so much so that some are making the case for moving capability building from HR to the PMO entirely.
Creating the desire: “A partnership with HR is what allows you to create the desire for change,” says Starnes. “It moves beyond simply communicating the plan to answering the critical question of what’s in it for the employee.”
Start with the why: To prove the model’s relevance, Starnes applies her philosophy to a timely modern test case: governing the adoption of AI. She advises starting with fundamental questions about purpose and pitfalls before issuing any top-down mandates. “I would take a step back and just ask: Why are you using it? What is the use case for the AI adoption? And what could be the pitfalls?”
Curiosity with controls: Her advice is to “pilot first,” building the organizational house one layer at a time to see what “human curiosity does with that tool.” The “pilot first” approach allows the organization to build guardrails while letting innovation flourish, a crucial balance given AI’s impact on workplace skills and the emerging AI divide that HR must help manage. “You can let curiosity lead the day as long as you have those controls in place and know what to do if they go outside those lines.”
But when does an organization actually need to formalize this structure? For leaders wondering if a PMO is just another layer of bureaucracy, Starnes provides a clear, two-part diagnostic. First, evaluate the project’s complexity. Second, determine if it requires scalability and repeatability across the entire enterprise. “A PMO is warranted when projects start impacting the entire enterprise. If there’s an opportunity for a process to scale across the organization and be repeatable, you need a formal structure to manage it from beginning to end and measure the results for the firm.”
Starnes concludes by encouraging organizations to define what a PMO means to them and then “test it out.” Testing the concept first creates a sandbox for organizational design, allowing companies to learn and iterate before committing to a firm-wide change. She advises that if internal expertise is lacking, seeking external guidance can help shape an initial structure. “Then, put a micro-PMO in place to test it and understand the value it brings.”
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TL;DR
PMOs fail when they become rigid, bureaucratic engines that treat strategy execution as a compliance exercise.
Darby Starnes, Vice President of Human Resources at Harding, Shymanski & Company, P.S.C. explains that a more effective PMO must be flexible enough to allow for adaptive, human-centered learning.
She argues that a strong PMO-HR partnership helps answer the “what’s in it for me” question for employees, moving beyond communication to create a genuine desire for change.
Darby Starnes
Harding, Shymanski & Company, P.S.C.
VP of HR
VP of HR
When PMOs are treated as rigid governance engines, project execution can become a compliance exercise rather than a problem-solving function. Such a focus on bureaucratic oversight undermines the goal of driving adaptive, human-centered change, which helps explain why strategy execution often unravels. The answer is an approach that balances strategic goals with the reality of human behavior, creating repeatable and scalable processes by making change feel supportive and safe for employees.
Darby Starnes is Vice President of Human Resources at the accounting firm Harding, Shymanski & Company, P.S.C. With over 15 years of experience and a track record of facilitating more than 800 workshops, she’s a proven organizational development leader. Her deep expertise, including a 12.5-year tenure at TriNet and an OD role with Inflection where she was heavily involved with M&A and IPO planning, positions her as the ideal guide for building a more effective, human-centric PMO.
“Any type of PMO can set strategy and clarify expectations, but it needs to be flexible enough to allow adaptive learning. Otherwise, it becomes a checkbox exercise instead of solving real problems,” says Starnes. She adds that the issue stems from a lack of engaged leadership and warns that a disengaged executive sponsor who isn’t involved in measuring progress can derail projects before they even get off the ground.
Leadership support: Starnes says that without this leadership support, the PMO ceases to be an accountability matrix or a place of resources, becoming instead “a place of dissonance where people don’t want to go to learn and grow.”
Reframing resistance: Starnes says the solution is a more “flattened” structure that helps foster a change-ready culture and a deep understanding of human psychology. Starnes points to the Kübler-Ross model– originally designed for grief- as a surprisingly apt framework, explaining that resistance should be reframed as a predictable and normal part of the transformation process. “People get excited about change, but as soon as it gets uncomfortable, they have a propensity to revert to what’s familiar. That is a normal, human response.”
Champions of change: Starnes says the challenge of employee resistance is best met by building a human support system. “The key is to provide support by putting mechanisms in place, identifying your change champions, and empowering them to keep the work moving forward so people don’t fall back into old patterns of comfort.”
A collaborative partnership between HR and the PMO then emerges as an effective strategy for driving the desire for change. Many successful organizations co-architect change from the start, recognizing the need for a structured change management process, as true adoption often hinges on connecting the “why, what, and how” of a transformation so employees can embrace new behaviors. A focus on the people power of transformations is a key driver of HR digital transformation, so much so that some are making the case for moving capability building from HR to the PMO entirely.
Creating the desire: “A partnership with HR is what allows you to create the desire for change,” says Starnes. “It moves beyond simply communicating the plan to answering the critical question of what’s in it for the employee.”
Start with the why: To prove the model’s relevance, Starnes applies her philosophy to a timely modern test case: governing the adoption of AI. She advises starting with fundamental questions about purpose and pitfalls before issuing any top-down mandates. “I would take a step back and just ask: Why are you using it? What is the use case for the AI adoption? And what could be the pitfalls?”
Curiosity with controls: Her advice is to “pilot first,” building the organizational house one layer at a time to see what “human curiosity does with that tool.” The “pilot first” approach allows the organization to build guardrails while letting innovation flourish, a crucial balance given AI’s impact on workplace skills and the emerging AI divide that HR must help manage. “You can let curiosity lead the day as long as you have those controls in place and know what to do if they go outside those lines.”
But when does an organization actually need to formalize this structure? For leaders wondering if a PMO is just another layer of bureaucracy, Starnes provides a clear, two-part diagnostic. First, evaluate the project’s complexity. Second, determine if it requires scalability and repeatability across the entire enterprise. “A PMO is warranted when projects start impacting the entire enterprise. If there’s an opportunity for a process to scale across the organization and be repeatable, you need a formal structure to manage it from beginning to end and measure the results for the firm.”
Starnes concludes by encouraging organizations to define what a PMO means to them and then “test it out.” Testing the concept first creates a sandbox for organizational design, allowing companies to learn and iterate before committing to a firm-wide change. She advises that if internal expertise is lacking, seeking external guidance can help shape an initial structure. “Then, put a micro-PMO in place to test it and understand the value it brings.”