I left the operational work behind, so I could think: a PMO Manager's evolution

Reading time: 8min

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I have worked in project management since 2008. Across that time I have operated inside large, highly structured organisations and inside small, fast-moving ones. When I joined Untile, I arrived with a bureaucratic, hierarchical, process-driven background. I believed my experience was my value. I was right about that. I was wrong about what I would have to change to use it well.

Key Takeaways

• The maturity and culture of a company, not the scale of your previous roles, decide how your knowledge should be applied. Moving into a smaller, faster organisation meant relearning how to use everything I already knew.
• Cutting operational time only matters if that time is reinvested in strategy, project design and the relationship with the client. The 60% reduction target serves that purpose, never the saving on its own.
• Concrete automation is what proves a strategy real. Connecting our schedules fully to Jira with time tracking is what turns a strategic intention into something that holds.
• Becoming a PMO Manager changed how I see every internal area. Marketing, HR and quality are all clients of project management when they have an initiative that creates value.
• Learning technical skills without a technical background is slow and demanding, and it is still within reach for someone who comes from management.
• Continuous learning is the one thing that compounds. Knowledge stays with you regardless of the company you work for.

The culture of the company changes what it asks of you

The companies I came from were large by design. Defined processes, clear hierarchy, everything in its assigned place. When you move into a younger, leaner organisation, none of that knowledge disappears, but almost all of it has to be applied differently. That took me time to accept, and in the beginning I was more resistant than I like to admit. The earlier mindsets carried weight. I had spent years learning to operate one way, and the instinct was to keep operating that way.

What changed my thinking was a simple realisation about context. The culture and the maturity of the company you work for determine what actually makes sense to do. A process that is essential in a heavily structured environment can become an obstacle in a more agile one, and the reverse is equally true. I am still a process-driven person. I have not stopped being one. The difference today is that I am flexible about it. I apply the techniques and the knowledge I have, and when a client's need changes, I change with it. The techniques exist to serve the client. The client does not exist to fit my techniques. Learning that distinction was the first real shift, and it set up everything that came after.

The certification forced me to look outward

I am PMP certified, and keeping that certification means courses and updates every year. I could have spent those hours confirming what I already knew well. I chose to spend them on what I did not yet understand. I redirected my focus toward the technological side of the work and toward the AI tools that are changing how project management is practised. The reasoning was straightforward. If the operational part of the job consumes less time, more time is freed for managing teams and clients, and that is the work that produces value.

I follow the evolution of the industry through the Project Management Institute and through what the global community is discussing. One of the things the PMP taught me, and that the years confirmed, is that project management is transversal. It works in healthcare, in construction, in engineering, in any sector you can name. The discipline travels. What does not travel without adaptation is the assumption that one approach fits everywhere. You have to understand the culture, the maturity, the organisational strategy and the structure of each context, and adapt to it. That principle is the thread that connects how I joined Untile to how I work now, and it is also what pushed me to stop treating my own role as fixed.

The step that proves the theory

Theory is easy to describe and hard to demonstrate. The demonstration came recently, when we connected our project schedules fully to Jira, time tracking included. Now every update a project member makes inside Jira reflects automatically in the schedule. The manual reconciliation that used to consume hours simply stops existing. This saves an enormous amount of time for project managers, and the target we set is a 60% reduction in operational time.

That saved time is the entire point, and it does not vanish. It converts into analytical and creative thinking, into the design of the project itself, into attention to the client and the team, into the development of leadership and communication. Building this was not comfortable. Constructing scripts, configuring APIs, setting up automations, working with analysis in Data Studio. I do not have a technical background. My training is in management. The process we built I still need to run three more times before I master it, because it is genuinely complex. When it works, the satisfaction is real, and it is the kind of satisfaction that makes the effort worth carrying. That willingness to sit inside something difficult until it works is, I think, the part of Untile's culture that shaped me most.

The PMO course changed my professional identity

The turning point happened during my certification in the PMO field. I was deciding between the Agile path and the PMO path, and during the course I understood that the PMO was where I wanted to be. The PMO is the strategic shift of project management. It stops being about the five phases of running a project and becomes about adding value to the entire company. I no longer think of myself as an operations manager. I think of myself as a PMO Manager, and the change is not only in the title. It is in who I consider my clients.

Marketing, HR, quality, any internal area with an initiative that will generate value at some point. They are all clients of the project management function. My work is to understand each one's needs, design solutions, implement them, improve them, and then verify whether the value was actually recognised. To support that, we have already developed dashboards built around real indicators. Where we are, where we are going, what the target is. The concern is no longer only whether a project is delivered on time and within budget. We want to manage benefits and sustain the continuity of the client inside the company. None of this would be possible if our time were still consumed by operational controls, which is exactly why the automation work and the strategic work belong to the same story.

Ownership is the work of a PMO

A colleague in HR, Elisabete, describes what I do as stepping outside my comfort zone. I see it simply as holding a strategic view and taking ownership. The PMO exists to act before a problem appears, not after it. Anticipating, structuring and improving the area is the job itself, and I treat it that way.

Since 2020, the new initiatives, the guidance, the mentoring and the structure of the area have come from me. People have seen me as a reference, and I have pulled the area forward as a matter of course. What sustains that is internal motivation, a real wish to change and to grow. Knowledge is the one thing nobody can take from you. If I had not gone to study, I would still be sitting in the process-driven thinking of 2020, at a low level of maturity. The goal is the opposite of that. It is to reach the level where the foundation is already defined and the work becomes continuous improvement. I owe part of that drive to people I have worked with. Elisabete inspires me to be more human and to keep people at the centre of how I lead. Miguel I recognise for his strategic thinking, the kind of leadership I would follow. And before any of them, my family, who understand the long hours and the weekends that this dedication sometimes demands.

What still remains

I want to keep moving deeper into the strategic side of the work, and that is a horizon rather than a finish line. My current focus is continually sharpening my business acumen to bridge the gap between execution and C-level strategy. Communicating as an equal with leadership, discussing business with clients, translating the language of business into the language of project management, and steering the area according to the company's strategy. The direction is clear, and the work is to keep deepening it.

There is one belief I held a few years ago that I now know to be false. The idea that at some point you know enough. You do not. The thinking used to be "I already know this, it is done." It is never done. Looking for knowledge is constant, and it is the thing that adds the most to my work every day. If I could pass one message to anyone building a career, it would be this. Focus on the career you actually want, independent of any single company, and define the plans that get you there. The small results accumulate. In the end, those small results become substantial ones, and the reward is first your own, and only afterward the reward of those you serve. Growth is not something you are given. It is something you build, and I am still building it.

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