How the State of the PMO 2025 Research Is Guiding the C-Suite

The C-Suite Playbook: Leveraging High-Performing PMOs to Accelerate Success

PM Solutions Research just released our flagship State of the PMO 2025 Research Report last week and it’s time to talk about how the data can really help the C-suite and organizations progress in the next 24 months. We’ve been tracking the development of PMOs since 2008 and bringing the best practices of high-performing PMOs to the forefront for organizations to help accelerate their own project management success.

During this time, we’ve continued to track the upward trend of PMOs being a strategic powerhouse of project execution and a center for project management excellence. Our profile of the high-performing PMO brings to light a few key takeaways:

• The majority of PMOs are strategic.
• The value of PMOs being challenged has been significantly reduced in the past 20 years.
• PMO operating costs have remained stable even in the face of increasing strategic value.
• PMOs are common in large organizations and are continuing to grow in small businesses.

As organizations move forward in 2025, we’ve identified the top activities of high-performing organizations:

1. Facilitating the sharing of resources, tools, methodologies, techniques
2. Enabling the consistent use of policies, procedures, templates
3. Communicating strategic work/progress (escalations, risks, benefits)
4. Standardizing project-related governance processes
5. Aligning work with strategic goals

These top activities and characteristics of high performers offer a roadmap to organizational improvement. From structure and activities of the PMO to practices and results, the statistics for high-performing PMOs show us a snapshot of success. Here is what the high performers are seeing as they realize results related to these best practices:

Now that we’ve got the data, the key is how to put it to good use in the next 24 months. We’ve got some suggestions as we continue to focus on the State of the PMO 2025 Research Report in our coming blog series!