The First Question Every PMO Should Always Ask

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.

  PMO  

I don’t care if you are departmental or enterprise, strategic or tactical, business-focused or governance-driven. PMOs must exist to support the other professionals involved in project delivery. It’s that simple.

Regardless of your specific mandate from the organization—or your area of focus, even your business objectives for the year—you have to support everyone else. Too often, I see organizations where PMOs believe that everyone else supports them. That may be project managers demonstrating compliance or providing updates. It may be validating training and skills, or it might be chasing data gaps in the central project management tool.

In many more scenarios, I see organizations where other project stakeholders—especially project managers—have the perception that the PMO is acting that way, even if it isn’t the case. They still view PMOs as some kind of control function that operates with the assumption that everyone is doing things wrong until they prove otherwise. Is that fair? Not always..but sometimes.

If we distill the PMO function down to its most basic level, it exists to ensure that the project environment is as effective and efficient as possible. It contributes to ensuring that the organization, department, or whatever scope it has can deliver the highest number of successful projects as possible in any given …

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