Friday, September 11, 2026 | 7:35AM to 8:50AM

This Event will be delivered via Zoom Meeting

Note: Registrants will be sent the Zoom link in the registration confirmation email, and also one day prior to the meeting!

Agenda:
7:35 - 7:50am  Login to Zoom, Networking
7:50 - 8:50am  Presentation and Discussion

The PM for this event is: Joseph Carfagno - [email protected]

Registration closes: Thursday, September 10, 2026 at Midnight

Working Without a PMO
facilitated by Joseph Carfagno, PMP

Many organizations don’t have a Project Management Office. Other organizations have weak PMOs. They still need to execute projects though. If you work in an organization without a strong PMO, PMI Infinity offers strong recommendations:

"Start each project with a brief charter or business case that states the objective, expected outcomes, scope boundaries, key stakeholders, success measures, budget or resource constraints, and major risks. That gives the team a shared reference point even when no central PMO exists.”

Keep governance lightweight but explicit. Define who the sponsor is and who is responsible for which decisions.
Build a plan with milestones, dependencies, owners, dependencies, and dates.

Projects execute well when there are strong communication rhythms. Have regular meetings to review what was done, what is next up, what is blocked, what needs a decision. Maintain risk and issue logs, or RAID logs, and review them regularly.

Consistency is key: having clear business cases, lightweight project plans, defined responsibilities, RAID logs, and methods to close out projects with lessons learned enforces project discipline.

In short:
“A practical no-PMO model looks like this: initiate with a clear purpose, plan at the level the team can actually manage, execute with visible ownership and regular reviews, govern through a sponsor and defined decision rights, and adapt quickly when conditions change.”

Even if you have a PMO, how many of these techniques do you use? Does your PMO help or hinder the execution of your projects?

Bring your experience of running and executing projects, war stories, or curiosity to our discussion of working without a PMO.

PDU Info: You will need to record and self-report your PDUs for this activity. Following the guidelines of the new CCR program and the PMI Talent Triangle®, the PDUs for this course can be applied as follows: 1.0 PDU - Ways of Workng

Joseph Carfagno has over 20 years of project experience in IT, primarily implementing and supporting enterprise-wide financial systems. As a program lead for SNEC-PMI he is committed to maintaining a valuable and sustainable series of Shelton meetings. He managed projects before he even heard of PMOs.