I’d add that stakeholder engagement is not only about keeping people informed — it’s about keeping them meaningfully involved.

What has worked well for me is tailoring communication not just to stakeholder influence or interest, but to the decisions and actions expected from them at each stage. Not everyone needs more information; sometimes they need clearer context, fewer details, or simply the right question at the right time.

In that sense, good stakeholder communication is less about frequency and more about relevance, timing, and purpose.

Thanks, Mario. I think your point about avoiding another layer of bureaucracy gets to the heart of the issue.

Perhaps sustainability does not need a separate governance process at all. It could instead become another lens applied to decisions the PMO already helps shape — project selection, business cases, risk reviews, procurement, stage gates, and benefits realization.

In that sense, the shift is less about adding sustainability management and more about changing the criteria behind existing decisions.

And your final point raises an interesting question: when cost, schedule, and sustainability pull in different directions, who should actually own that trade-off — the PMO, the sponsor, or the governance board?

Is Sustainability Still a Project KPI—or Should It Become a PMO Decision Criterion?

Sustainability is increasingly discussed as a project objective, but I’m curious about where it should actually sit within project governance.

In construction projects, sustainability decisions can affect scope, cost, risk, procurement, and long-term value—areas already closely connected to the PMO.

So should the PMO simply track sustainability KPIs, or should it have a more active role in integrating sustainability into project selection, decision-making, and benefits realization?

I’d be interested to hear how this works in your organization or projects.

My first projects taught me something I still carry today: project management is not just about delivering the plan—it’s about making good decisions when reality no longer follows it. Over the years, I’ve also learned that listening to the people closest to the work often reveals risks and opportunities that no schedule can show.

AI can improve the quality of information behind a decision, but accountability still belongs to people. Perhaps the real value is not choosing between AI and human judgment, but designing a decision process where each strengthens the other.

I haven’t worked on a Saudi giga-project directly, but looking at these programmes through the lens of construction and project management, one shift seems particularly important to me:

At megaproject scale, the project itself becomes a system.

A PM can be excellent at scheduling, cost control, contracts, and reporting and still struggle if decisions are made in isolation. At this scale, one decision can travel across interfaces — affecting design, procurement, contractors, communities, authorities, cash flow, and sometimes entirely different projects within the same programme.

So perhaps one thing PMs need to unlearn is the idea that tighter control automatically means better management. The bigger the system becomes, the more important interfaces, decision rights, information flow, and adaptability become.

I think the PMO has an especially interesting role here: not simply as a reporting layer, but as the place where complexity is translated into better decisions.In that…

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I don’t think the real problem is that project management has become too process-heavy. The problem starts when process becomes disconnected from decision-making. I’ve seen projects with plenty of reports, meetings, dashboards and procedures — yet the important decisions were still late, unclear, or had no real owner.

So I tend to use a simple test: What decision does this process help us make — or what risk does it help us control?If a report, meeting or approval layer cannot answer either question, I would challenge whether we still need it.

For me, a good PMO shouldn’t be a documentation factory. It should be a decision-enabling system: enough governance to create visibility and accountability, but enough freedom to keep the project moving. Maybe the question isn’t “How much process is enough?” but “How much process actually improves the quality and speed of our decisions?”

I try not to treat every delay as a scheduling problem.

My first question is: What does this delay actually threaten? The critical path, a key milestone, site productivity, cash flow, or perhaps nothing critical at all?

Once the real impact is clear, I look at re-sequencing, alternative resources, partial handovers, or parallel work before simply pushing the timeline. And if a decision or intervention is needed from management, I prefer to escalate early — but with options, not just a problem.

One lesson I’ve learned from construction is that a delayed activity doesn’t always mean a delayed project. Poorly managing that delay might.

For me, the goal isn’t to protect the original schedule at any cost. It’s to protect the project outcome.

One of the biggest risks I’ve faced in construction wasn’t a technical one — it was delayed decision-making.

A technical problem can often be solved. But when a decision sits unresolved between the client, consultant, contractor and project team, the impact quietly spreads: procurement gets delayed, crews lose productivity, sequences change, costs rise, and eventually a “small issue” becomes a project-level problem.

What I’ve learned is that managing risk isn’t only about identifying what might go wrong. It’s also about creating a clear path for who decides what, by when, and based on which information.

Sometimes the biggest construction risk isn’t uncertainty itself — it’s uncertainty without ownership.