How should PMOs operate when decisions are influenced more by relationships than by formal structures?

PMOs should balance formal governance with strong stakeholder management. When relationships shape decisions, effectiveness comes from understanding informal influence, building trust, and aligning key stakeholders early while still maintaining transparency and accountability.

If influence outweighs formal governance, something is off. The PMO must define, implement, and safeguard a robust framework for the effective planning, execution, and monitoring of projects, and ensure that all stakeholders comply with it. Otherwise, decision-making risks being driven by the loudest voices rather than by agreed processes and organizational priorities.

The question is not whether relationships influence decisions.

They always do.

The real question is what happens when the organization's formal governance model no longer reflects how decisions are actually made.

Most organizations operate through two parallel architectures.
One is visible: structures, roles, committees, reporting lines, and decision rights.
The other is largely invisible: trust, credibility, expertise, informal networks, historical relationships, and personal influence.

Problems rarely arise because either architecture exists.
They arise when the gap between them becomes too large.

When formal governance and operational reality diverge, organizations begin to develop a hidden decision architecture.
Decisions are made in one place, while accountability remains somewhere else.
Over time, transparency decreases, assumptions go unchallenged, and decision quality can deteriorate without anyone noticing.

This is where PMOs create their greatest value.

Their role is not to eliminate informal influence, nor to act as process police.
Their role is to understand how decisions actually flow through the organization, make critical dependencies visible, identify where influence resides, and help realign governance with operational reality.

In that sense, effective PMOs are not merely governance functions.
They are organizational observatories that help leaders see the difference between how decisions are supposed to be made and how they are actually made.

Relationships will always influence decisions.

The real measure of governance maturity is whether that influence remains visible, challengeable, transparent, and connected to accountability, rather than becoming a substitute for it.

"Governance defines how decisions should be made..." at the project/program/portfolio level - who participates in decision-making, who signs off, cadence for reviews, escalation paths, documentation, etc. This is process, not influence. Business leaders may follow the process, but the process does not influence the decision in the same way that people do.

A PMO will be more successful if it can 1) understand and operate within it's organizational reality, 2) translate between execution/delivery and strategy, and 3) recognize that informal influence should not be automatically considered dysfunction. If you include a risk assessment in the decision, you don't automatically choose to not do something just because there is risk involved. If opportunity cost or ROI is a factor in the decision, it's just one factor. Trust and relationships matter, but you shouldn't over-index on them, either. If a PMO leader thinks the business is weighting one factor too heavily, it is in that leaders best interests to understand why (there may be a good reason for it) and to understand what they can do to influence things in a better direction (they may not be able to).

I learned a lesson, early in my career, that, when push comes to shove, the business rarely cares what a BOK says you're supposed to do. I learned a similar lesson when I started operating at the PMO level. At a former employer, they wanted the appearance of governance and a handbook that outlined how things were supposed to be done. Governance mattered ... at the project level. PMOs cannot operate effectively by understanding governance alone. They also need organizational awareness, including how influence, incentives, trust, operational pressure, and executive priorities shape decisions across the business. The PMO is not a watchdog that enforces governance across the company. If it wants to survive, it needs to understand the problems and opportunities the business needs addressed and the role the business needs it to fill, paying attention to whether/how that need is changing over time.