A 40-page monthly portfolio report, covering about 120 projects, with every figure reconciled with finance. It was the pride of a regional energy company’s project office, and almost nobody read it.
Americo Pinto tells the case in an article PMI published on its blog on 23 October 2026. That PMO had well-defined services, integrated tools and a maturity assessment that placed it ahead of its industry. When they talked to the executives who received the report, most read the first page when they had time. Investment decisions were made elsewhere, in a quarterly committee working from a spreadsheet finance put together the week before.
Nothing in the assessment was wrong. The PMO was doing its work well. What was happening is that the people it did that work for no longer needed it in that form.
Two questions that look like one
Pinto separates two things we tend to measure together. The first is service maturity, which he defines as the sophistication and effectiveness with which a selected service is delivered. The second is alignment, which means choosing and prioritising services based on what customers need now, the outcomes they expect and the organisation’s priorities.
It is worth noticing where he places the problem. A maturity assessment starts from a list of services and asks how well each one is performed, without asking where the list came from. It measures the first question and takes the second as answered.
Think of it as a nautical chart. Maturity is the quality of the drawing, the precision of every sounding, the clean line of the coast. Alignment is whether the coast is still where you drew it. A pristine chart of a bay that the river has already moved is not a bad chart, it is a chart that takes you with complete accuracy to a place where there is no water any more.
And the coast moves. According to Pinto, alignment wears off when strategy, sponsors or decision rights change. A charter or a service catalogue only proves that the need existed on the day someone wrote it down. And customers ask for solutions, not needs. They ask for a dashboard when what they need is faster investment decisions, which is why a service can be popular and misaligned, or unpopular and still the right one.
The matrix of four situations
Because maturity and alignment are independent, a PMO can be well aligned and immature, or highly mature and misaligned. Crossing them gives four boxes, each with its own priority.
Matrix by Americo Pinto on the PMI blog, Before You Improve PMO Maturity, Ask If You’re Doing the Right Work, 23 October 2026.
The emerging PMO works on the right things without yet delivering them consistently, and that is where investing in maturity pays off most. The misaligned performer is the opposite, and the energy company’s PMO was one. It executes with excellence, but its services miss what customers need, so its value goes unrecognised. The at-risk PMO is weak on both counts and its legitimacy is usually low, and putting more into its services before validating the need only deepens the problem.
The fourth box has a nuance I find the finest point of the article. A value-ready PMO combines high alignment and high maturity, and that, Pinto says, is a threshold and not a result. The value still has to be activated, and activating it means being in the conversations where customers make their decisions. You can be ready for value without generating it.
Four questions before maturing anything
Pinto proposes asking whether a service is needed before asking how well it is delivered, starting with the ones that take up most capacity. Who is it for, and what outcome does it help them achieve? Does that outcome still serve a current organisational priority? What would its customers lose if it stopped tomorrow, in their own words rather than the team’s? And if the need holds up, would better delivery make a noticeable difference to the outcome?
The answers lead to one of four decisions per service. Improve it when the need is valid and better delivery would change the outcome. Sustain it when it is aligned and already delivered well, and put the effort into activating its value. Redesign it when the need is still there but the service no longer meets it. And retire it when the need is gone. Before retiring a mature service it is worth asking what would be lost, because a service that works well can make the problem it solves invisible.
What this has to do with your exam
The July 2026 PMP examination content outline does not talk about PMO maturity, but it does talk about the same mistake on a small scale. In the People domain, the task of planning and managing communication includes, among its enablers, creating reports aligned with sponsors and stakeholder expectations. Aligned, not exhaustive. If a question shows you a flawless report that nobody reads, the right answer will almost never be to polish it further. It will be to ask the sponsor what decision they need to make with it.
In the Business Environment domain, the one that grew most and that we covered in the Business Environment post, the first task is to define and establish project governance, and one of its enablers is to define success metrics. A badly chosen metric rewards exactly what happened to this PMO. When what moves is your own organisation’s strategy, we described that wear in the post on strategy losing coherence.
If you are thinking of the PMO as your next step after the PMP, the path is in the post on a PMO career.
How the report ended
The executives would have lost nothing without the 40 pages. What they lacked was a clear view of which projects were competing for the same money and the same people. The PMO and finance turned the report into a two-page brief for the investment committee. For a while it scored lower on maturity than the old report, and it was the first thing the executives asked for by name.
A chart is redrawn when the coast moves, even if the new drawing comes out rougher than the old one. What cannot be forgiven is to keep refining the line of a shore that is no longer there.
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