You know that quiet, perfectly efficient system you have for hunting a housefly? You spot it, you stalk it, you pounce, and you catch it.
Simple. Direct. Effective.
A Project Management Office (PMO) is what happens when a group of humans looks at that simple hunt, panics, and builds an entire department of non-hunters whose only job is to watch you do it, colour-code your progress, and demand to know why the fly hasn’t been caught yet.
The traffic-light litter tray: A PMO does not catch flies. A PMO creates “dashboards.”
Every morning, while you are mid-stalk, a human from the PMO will wave a piece of paper in your face and ask if your fly-hunting project is Green (going well), Amber (a little delayed because the fly flew near a lamp), or Red (you missed the pounce and are now grooming yourself to pretend you didn’t care anyway).
If you report “Red,” they do not help you catch the fly. They simply invite six other humans into a room to spend an hour discussing why the fly is red.
Standardisation of the pounce: You have your own way of hunting. Sometimes you wiggle your butt four times; sometimes you wiggle it five times. It depends on the rug.
The PMO hates this. They exist to enforce “Methodology.” They want to create a 40-page document called The Standardised Feline Pounce Framework (v2.4).
They insist that every cat in the house must wiggle their butt precisely three times, log the wiggle in a shared digital diary, and seek sign-off from a Senior Pounce Officer before airborne launch.
The resource capacity planner: In the human world, you are not a cat; you are a “resource.”
If there are three flies in the kitchen, a normal creature hunts them one by one. A PMO looks at you and says: “This feline is currently operating at only 33% capacity. We need to allocate them to two additional mice in the kitchen and a potential bird on the balcony simultaneously to optimise operational output.”
When you inevitably collapse into a 14-hour nap due to sheer absurdity, they log it as an “unplanned outage.”
To be fair to the PMO: To give credit where it’s due, while you’re busy staring intensely at the fly, they are the ones making sure nobody accidentally trips over your tail, runs out of cat-food budget, or forgets where the door to the kitchen is.
The Reality: Even so, it remains a department that catches no mice itself, occupying the warmest sunbeams in the house just to hand out clipboards to the cats doing the actual pouncing.
(Sorry for being mean to those who do PMO – deepest respect really. It is important work. Just not to a cat)