319: You Get More Bees With Honey with Brandy Brown

August 3, 2025·42 min·3 clips

Brandy Brow shares how she stumbled into PMO leadership and had to Google for days just to figure out where to start.

This episode features host Laura Bernard interviewing Brandy Brow, an organizational strategist and member of Bernard's Impact Accelerator Mastermind program. Brow holds a master's in industrial-organizational psychology and is a ProSci-certified change practitioner. She currently leads enterprise portfolio prioritization and strategy realization efforts while maturing her organization's EPMO. Brow recounts accidentally entering PMO leadership after being hired as a project manager and immediately being tasked with setting up a new PMO. She describes Googling for guidance and finding Bernard's PMO Strategies, which emphasized a tailored, organizational "fingerprint" approach over a one-size-fits-all model. A critical factor in her four-year success was having a supportive yet challenging executive sponsor who acted as a "true North Star." This sponsor provided cultural insight, removed barriers, and held Brow accountable by consistently asking, "Why do I care as a leader?" Brow explains her sponsor would often delay initiatives by saying, "now's not the right time," which taught strategic patience and timing. She built credibility through annual stakeholder interviews to identify pain points and by delivering "quick wins" and "pain relief" within initial 90-day iterations. A key insight is that established EPMOs face different challenges than new ones, as stakeholders develop stronger opinions and expectations once processes are proven. Brow advises against "boiling the ocean" and emphasizes solving for root causes, not just symptoms. She shares internal mantras from the mastermind, like "don't boil the ocean" and "be their pain relief," which guide her daily work. Brow states she "couldn't have done it without the mastermind group," which provided a supportive community and a "mattress" to "fail faster and more productively." Her advice to her past self includes listening more, collaborating openly, and practicing self-care to be a "safe space" for stakeholders. The tone is conversational, supportive, and educational, blending personal storytelling with practical PMO leadership advice. Project and transformation leaders, especially those feeling isolated or tasked with building or maturing a PMO, would find this episode highly relatable. Listeners seeking purely technical, process-heavy project management content might find it less applicable.

As heard by us

PMO success is treated as a people-first effort, with sponsorship and pushback doing real work.

The episode frames PMO success as a people problem first and a process problem second. Laura Bernard emphasizes the need to read the people dynamics, the power structure, and the unwritten rules inside each organization, then work with them instead of pretending they do not…

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Why you'd press play

You need the people strategy behind the PMO, not just the process chart.

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