Your Extended Workforce Programme Needs a PMO. Not Your MSP’s PMO. Your PMO.
Strategic PMO in extended workforce management isn’t new. We built one for a global healthcare enterprise back in 2015. PMI shortlisted it for PMO of the Year in 2019. Programme adoption went from 40% to 94% in 3 years.
That was ten years ago.
The model worked because it did what strategic PMO is supposed to do: connect cross-functional teams, turn visibility into decisions, and identify opportunities instead of just tracking compliance. Not report on metrics. Orchestrate outcomes.
But most extended workforce programmes still don’t have this infrastructure. And that’s costing businesses real decision-making capability.
Where PMO sits in your ecosystem
MSPs should be focused on operational excellence. Supplier management, compliance, process efficiency. That’s what they’re built for and where they add value.
Strategic PMO sits above that. It’s the layer that connects your MSP operation to HR strategy, procurement objectives, finance planning, and hiring manager needs. It translates operational data into business intelligence. It asks questions MSPs aren’t positioned to ask.
This function needs independence. Not because MSPs aren’t capable. Because commercial relationships create structural conflicts that governance can’t work around.
When the same entity managing your suppliers is also defining what insights you see, you’ve got a lens problem. It doesn’t matter how good the MSP is. The incentive structure doesn’t support the kind of transparency that drives strategic decisions.
How we got here
IT figured out strategic PMO in the 2000s. Enterprises like Intel and Microsoft stopped treating PMO as an admin function and started building decision-making infrastructure. Strategic enablement, not just reporting.
Organisational change caught up in the 2010s. PMOs evolved into transformation offices. They orchestrate enterprise-wide change, connect functions that usually work in silos, turn data into action. Some organisations now have Chief Transformation Officers whose entire role grew from PMO capability.
Extended workforce? Still debating whether “program management office oversight by the service provider” counts as governance.
It doesn’t. That’s operational support. Valuable, necessary operational support. But it’s not independent orchestration.
What strategic PMO actually does
It connects the dots your organisation can’t connect on its own.
HR doesn’t naturally talk to procurement. Procurement doesn’t instinctively collaborate with hiring managers. Finance wants data that operations isn’t collecting. Everyone’s optimising for their own function.
Strategic PMO creates the structure where these conversations happen. Where someone’s asking: Are we over-indexed on expensive resource types? Should we build this capability or keep buying it? Which suppliers actually deliver quality versus just fill seats? How does extended workforce strategy fit our broader talent plans?
Those questions need answers from your perspective. Not filtered through a commercial relationship.
Transparency drives opportunities. That’s not marketing language. That’s how this works. When you can see what’s actually happening across your extended workforce, you spot things you couldn’t see before. Patterns in performance. Gaps in capability. Places where a small change creates disproportionate value.
But only if the PMO structure is independent enough to surface what you need to see, not what someone else needs you to see.
The deployment moment
If you’re building MSP infrastructure right now – or renewing contracts, or consolidating fragmented governance – think about your PMO architecture now.
Not after go-live when you realise you’re flying blind. Not six months in when visibility isn’t translating to decisions. Now, as a fundamental design consideration.
You can’t outsource accountability. The best governance is what people actually use. And if your extended workforce programme runs under procurement oversight with no dedicated PMO, you’re optimising for cost reduction instead of workforce effectiveness.
Not procurement’s fault. They’re measured on what they’re measured on. It’s just the wrong lens for orchestrating strategic capability.
We’ve done this before
We built that 2015 model from inside a global enterprise. Not as consultants advising from the outside. As the team building and running the infrastructure.
We know what works because we lived it. The cross-functional COE structure. The governance frameworks people wanted to use instead of working around. The data integration that turned fragmented information into actual insight.
Programme adoption hitting 94% in 3 years wasn’t luck. It was designing for adoption from the start, not bolting governance onto operations after the fact.
That’s the model Concerto was built on. Ten years of refinement at enterprise scale.
Where the market’s going
The shift IT made in the 2000s, the shift organisational change made in the 2010s – that’s happening now in extended workforce management.
Strategic PMO is moving from nice-to-have to competitive advantage. The organisations building this capability now are the ones who’ll be orchestrating ecosystems while everyone else is still trying to consolidate supplier reports.
Question is whether you build it while you’re deploying infrastructure, or retrofit it later when you realise your visibility gap is actually an orchestration gap.
Building or upgrading your extended workforce infrastructure? Let’s explore what strategic PMO could look like for you. Schedule a conversation
