About

Chris Cognasso

Enterprise PMO and OCM Consultant. 35 years at the intersection of delivery and adoption.

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I have spent thirty-five years inside organizations where the stakes were high enough that getting it wrong had real consequences. Congressional oversight. Three million home loans. Benefits delivery that couldn't miss a cycle. A school board that had to trust someone before they would move.

I work alongside organizations, not above them. The first thing I do when I walk in is not assess your PMO maturity or review your project plan. The first thing I do is find where the seam is, where delivery accountability ends and adoption accountability begins, and what is falling through the gap. That gap is almost always where the problem lives.

"The goal is never dependency. It is capability. An organization that understands its own integration failure is already most of the way to fixing it."


Experience

Four worlds. One toolkit.

Pentagon · Army CIO
Federal · Consultant

Stood up the EPMO from scratch. Built the portfolio infrastructure, governance model, and oversight framework for 16 strategic programs totaling $1.6B under congressional scrutiny.

JPMorgan Chase
Private Sector · FTE

Owned the master program schedule for the WaMu acquisition, a migration of 3 million home loans where every sequencing decision carried zero tolerance for service disruption.

Amazon
Private Sector · FTE

Embedded Program Manager within the Global Tax PMO, supporting tax compliance initiatives across 25 jurisdictions and 6 continents.

Seattle Public Schools
Education · Consultant

Principal consultant, owning the effort from inception to completion end to end, including contracts, vendors, requirements, configuration, change management, and digitization.

Washington State Government
State · FTE + Consultant

DOH Operations Director, reported to the Secretary. Project and consulting roles across DNR, L&I, DSHS, ESD, and HCA. A decade inside state government where regulatory timelines were not optional.

The full toolkit
What makes it different

Most practitioners have one world. State government, or federal, or enterprise. One methodology. One domain. The combination of all three, earned as both insider and consultant, is rare.

PMP
Project Management Professional
PMI-ACP
Agile Certified Practitioner
PROSCI
Change Management Certification
SAFe 6.0
Scaled Agile Framework
CSM
Certified Scrum Master
SCPM
Stanford Advanced Program Management

If something here named a problem you are living with, that is the place to start.

Available for contract and consulting engagements. Based in Olympia, WA.