THE CHANGE ORDER

Opening Note

Hi there,

September always feels like the "real" start of the year to me — more than January ever does. Budgets get revisited, Q4 plans get locked, and every PM and Change leader I know starts asking some version of the same question: are we actually set up to keep doing this well, or are we just getting through the next project?

That question is what this issue is about. Grab your coffee — let's get into it.

The Big Idea

Building a Center of Excellence

There's a difference between having a PMO (or a change function) and having a Center of Excellence.

A PMO tracks projects. A Center of Excellence builds the muscle that makes every future project easier — the standards, the templates, the shared language — so results don't depend on any one hero holding it all together in their head.

Sources: Clarkston Consulting, 2026 OCM Trends · PMI 2025 Pulse of the Profession (via Prism PPM)

Both numbers point to the same root cause: teams optimizing for the current project instead of the system underneath it. If you only take one thing from this issue — the next time you close out a project or a change rollout, ask what part of how you did it should become a repeatable asset. That question, asked consistently, is the whole difference between a PMO and a Center of Excellence.

Industry Watch

PMI just gave AI governance a standard

In June, PMI published The Standard for Artificial Intelligence in Portfolio, Program, and Project Management — the first global standard for how AI gets deployed inside project work. Eight guiding principles, five performance domains, a full lifecycle framework for AI business cases, tool selection, risk, ethics oversight, and staying compliant with things like the EU AI Act and ISO 42001.

PMI's reasoning: AI is rolling out across companies faster than any governance framework can track it — and almost every one of those rollouts happens as a project. There was no published playbook for the people running them. Now there is.

Source: PMI, "PMI Publishes World's First Global Standard for AI in Project Work," June 2026

From the Field

The Crawl, Walk, Run Maturity Check

One technique I come back to constantly, whether I'm standing up a PMO or a change practice from scratch: before building anything new, score the team's current state — honestly — across five areas, on a simple 1–3 scale.

• 1Intake — one place new work enters, or does everything arrive sideways?
• 2Standards — templates that get used, or does every project reinvent them?
• 3Visibility — can a leader see status without asking directly?
• 4Adoption — any way to know if a change actually stuck?
• 5Governance — a defined decision-maker for scope, risk, and priority calls?

Most teams score a 4 or 5 out of 15 the first time — and that's useful, not discouraging. It turns "we need to be more mature" into "we're weakest on Adoption and Governance." Whatever the lowest score is, that's where the first Center of Excellence asset should go. This works identically for PM discipline or a change practice — the five categories just get read through a different lens.

Grab This — Free

Find out where you stand

If the maturity check got you thinking "where do we even stand right now" — two free self-assessments go deeper, one for each side of the house:

From the Vault

Close the gap this week

Once you know where the gaps are, the fastest way to close them without hiring anyone is with a ready-made template library — built from 30 years of doing this work, not theory.