Thank you for joining the latest session of the PMO Club, where Dóra Béres shared her insights on what it takes to build a PMO from scratch within a rapidly growing company. The session offered a highly honest, experience-based look at how a PMO can evolve from a function that initially raises skepticism into a true business partner.

Dóra’s example comes from the Alteo Group, which entered a phase of becoming a large enterprise following MOL’s acquisition of a partial ownership stake. In this dynamic and fast-changing environment, the unification of project management practices, strengthening transparency, and establishing strategy-focused portfolio management became essential.

The early phase required reactive operations — “quick wins” and a lot of personal persuasion. This was achieved through stakeholder interviews, mapping data needs, creating manual reports, and actively stepping in to help with projects facing difficulties. Dóra emphasized that at this stage, a PMO doesn’t need to “predict the future”; it needs to deliver clear, tangible, fast results that help the organization immediately.

The turning point came with the introduction of a unified PMO system based on a single source of truth (SPoT), supporting automated reporting and data-driven decision-making. Alongside this, PMO standards, methodologies, governance elements, and templates were created. One key lesson: methodology only becomes real and meaningful when the organization sees its day-to-day practical value.

Dóra highlighted the factors essential for gaining acceptance of a PMO: creating value through quick wins, building a consistent professional foundation, ensuring high-quality reporting, forming partnerships with critical leaders, and supporting the company’s strategic objectives. Participants also heard striking examples of how even initially resistant leaders eventually shifted toward active collaboration.

Future plans include expanding the PMO team, taking ownership of cross-functional projects, further integrating the OKR framework, and strengthening project culture and PM competencies across the organization. In this way, the PMO can operate as a true strategic partner rather than merely a control function.

The session concluded with a lively discussion on selecting the right PMO tools, training approaches, and effective stakeholder management practices. Participants also shared valuable experiences from their own organizations.

We hope this summary is useful for those who could not attend in person. We will soon return with details of the next event.