Chris Cognasso · Olympia, Washington

I build and rescue the operating model behind enterprise transformation.

The PMO, EPMO, or TMO. The portfolio governance. The change adoption that makes it stick. Over 25+ years I have stood up these functions from zero and stabilized stalled, high-stakes programs across insurance, financial services, federal, and Fortune 500 environments.

What I am looking for

PMO and portfolio leadership. EPMO stand-ups, governance builds, and portfolio turnarounds. Permanent, contract, or interim.

Email me → 360.951.7433 LinkedIn ↗

The work behind that sentence

Built as an employee. Rescued as a consultant. The same work from both sides of the table.

Federal · Consultant

Established an EPMO across a $1.6B+ federal portfolio

U.S. Army CIO/G-6 at the Pentagon. Sixteen programs, each over $100M. Built the methodology, the tooling, and the training, including Six Sigma executive reporting behind $500M+ in annual congressional approvals. The function did not exist before it was built.

Private Sector · Employee, AVP to VP

VP, PMO and Enterprise Portfolio Management through the largest bank failure in U.S. history

JPMorgan Chase. Promoted AVP to VP. Scheduling lead for the migration of more than 3 million home loans with zero data loss during the Washington Mutual acquisition. Ran the PM support office through the integration.

Private Sector · Consultant

Stabilized global tax and finance operations

Engaged as a consultant and embedded as a program manager within Amazon's FGBS Tax PMO. Led defined workstreams: requirements stabilization, security and credential remediation, M365 introduction, and cutover governance. Built a shared requirements library assembled with Anthropic Claude, adopted across the program through deliberate change management.

Public Sector · Employee and Consultant

Delivered public-sector modernization in low-trust environments

Washington and Oregon state agencies. A $100M DMV modernization. A $4.8M SaaS migration for Employment Security, inherited after a prior program failure with zero vendor trust, rebuilt through governance design and change leadership, and cleared through State Security Design Review.

Private Sector · Employee

Today

EPMO Program Manager at a mid-size insurance carrier, helping establish and mature portfolio governance from the inside: the operating model, stage-gate governance, investment scoring, and an 84-project portfolio dashboard. AI-accelerated, human-directed.

Written

Field guides

Long-form diagnostics I wrote. Free, no email required. They are the clearest evidence of how I think about these problems.

The PMO Field Guide37 questions on governance, sponsor accountability, and portfolio discipline that produces decisions.
The OCM Field Guide37 questions on adoption readiness, sponsor behavior, and change that moves behavior rather than awareness.
Why Transformations Fail27 questions on scope integrity, executive alignment, and recovering a stalled program.
Portfolio GovernanceHow intake, prioritization, and tollgates work when they are actually enforced.
The PMO and OCM Integration FrameworkFive connection points between delivery and adoption, the seam most organizations mismanage.
The Integration BriefThe short version of the integration model.

PMO + OCM

Delivery and adoption are the same problem. Most organizations treat them as two.

Every failed implementation has the same autopsy. The project team delivered. The change team ran training. The system went live. Six months later, nothing is different. The failure is not in either function. It is in the seam between them.

“The question is never whether the project succeeded. The question is whether the organization changed. Those are different questions with different owners.”

Chris Cognasso, Enterprise PMO & OCM Consultant

Published Framework

Waypoint

12-Step EPMO Field Guide

Waypoint is a practitioner field guide for building EPMO governance in organizations that have none. Not a certification program. Not a consultant playbook. A codification of what actually works, drawn from federal agencies, financial institutions, global enterprises, and state governments where getting it wrong had real consequences.

Each step exists because the one before it creates the conditions the next requires. The sequence is not arbitrary. It is a dependency chain, and the chain is the practice. If you want to know how I think before you talk to me, read it. It is the most honest interview I can give you.

Explore Waypoint →

12 Sequential steps

36 Practitioner artifacts

5 PMO disciplines

Free No email required