Calendar of Events

Most new PMOs are not undone by bad templates or the wrong tool. They are undone by a slow loss of relevance, usually inside the first eighteen months, because nobody ever agreed on what the PMO was actually for. The decisions that determine whether a PMO survives are made long before the first status report goes out.  In 2025 PMI published Project Management Offices: A Practice Guide, its first standard dedicated entirely to PMOs, built with input from hundreds of PMO practitioners through the PMO Global Alliance. This session takes that guidance off the page and puts it to work on a question every chapter member eventually faces: where do you actually start?  Bruno Freitas walks through how to stand up a PMO in an organization that has never had one. He covers how to read what the business genuinely needs before choosing an operating model, how the Practice Guide's PMO Value Ring reframes design around stakeholder value rather than function, what belongs in your first 90 days and what to deliberately postpone, and how the Value-Generating PMO Flywheel keeps a young PMO earning its mandate past the first budget cycle. Along the way he shares real examples from PMO builds in financial services, energy and public sector organizations, including the ones that went sideways and what he would do differently. Bruno will also point attendees to the PMO Global Alliance community and its resources, and give a short overview of the PMI PMO Certified Practitioner (PMI-PMOCP) credential for anyone considering formalizing this work.