Middle School Excuses & PMO Truths
“Everyone’s doing it.”
That might fly when we’re talking middle school fads—gel pens, slap bracelets, or questionable bangs—but it’s not how professional reputations (or successful projects) are built.
In project management, I’ve seen the “easy way” get normalized: skip the planning, skip the checks, rush through because it saves time… until it doesn’t. The cracks always show. Costs climb. Trust erodes.
Here’s the PMO truth: sometimes you need to slow down to speed up.
That’s where the 80/20 rule comes in—spend 20% of the time up front planning, and you’ll reap 80% of the value later.
Think of it like a family vacation.
Put in the work up front—book the hotel, grab the airline tickets, map out the basics—and when you arrive, you actually get to enjoy yourself.
Skip the planning, and you’re at the airport with four layovers, a 20-hour delay at JFK, finally landing to find every hotel sold out thanks to a giant conference. Now you’re driving an hour each way, bleeding money, and googling therapists by day three.
Sure, you “made it.” You technically got where you were going. But it cost more, took longer, and drained the joy right out of the experience.
Projects work the same way. Cutting corners to save time only guarantees you’ll spend more fixing problems later.
Wrong is wrong—even if everyone’s doing it.
Right is right—even if you’re the only one doing it.
And in PMOs, “right” usually starts with a plan.
And since no Menopause Diary would be complete without a few “real talk” PMO tips, here are some I live by:
Define “done” early. If you don’t, half the room will think “done” means an MVP, and the other half will think it means a full-blown Cadillac. Cue scope creep and chaos.
Keep a decision log. Because three months from now someone will swear they never agreed to that launch date. (Spoiler: they did.)
Use the parking lot trick. Out-of-scope ideas aren’t bad—they’re just not for this project. Parking them keeps people heard while keeping your sanity intact.
Show the tradeoffs. A simple Impact/Effort chart can do wonders. Nothing like a good visual to make people realize their “urgent” request might actually derail the real priorities.
Celebrate the boring stuff. Risk logs, RAID items, governance—it’s not sexy, but it’s the stuff that saves projects. Call it out so people get it.
Repeat the 80/20. Twenty percent up-front planning saves eighty percent of the drama later. Think of it as your project’s hormone replacement therapy—it keeps the hot flashes (aka fires) at bay.
Because at the end of the day, projects don’t fail because we planned too much. They fail because we thought “everyone’s doing it” was good enough.
#PMO #IntegrityAtWork #DoTheRightThing #SlowDownToSpeedUp
