What Exactly Does Your PMO Do?
Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at [email protected]. Andy's new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.
I was recently asked to explain the idea of a PMO to someone who had absolutely no experience with the concept and didn’t know what a PMO was, why it existed, or what it did.
That’s a pretty unusual situation for me. While I have had many conversations with people who didn’t know much about PMOs (and my LinkedIn Learning PMO overview course is by far my most popular), pretty much everyone that I talk to or that takes that course has at least a basic understanding of the concept.
They may have worked as part of a project team and heard the PMO referenced by the project manager. They may have worked as a stakeholder, or even been part of a functional team that provided resources to projects, even if they themselves weren’t assigned. I don’t have statistics to back it up, but my guess is that these days, most people have some idea of what a PMO is, they have at least heard of it and know that it is something to do with projects.
So that made my conversation with this individual who didn’t know anything about PMOs unusual. But it was also a much easier conversation than I expected. You see, he didn’t have any preconceived ideas of what a PMO was. At no point in the conversation did he say, “I thought that…” or “In my organization they…”.
That made me think. Getting people to understand what …
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"Do not fear to be eccentric in opinion, for every opinion now accepted was once eccentric." - Bertrand Russell |
