Why Use an Agile PMO? Enable Faster Decisions With Shorter Feedback Loops

Johanna Rothman, known as the "Pragmatic Manager," offers frank advice for your challenging problems. She consults with leaders and teams to help them learn about practical and possible options. They can then decide how to adapt their product development. Her most recent book is "Project Lifecycles: How to Reduce Risks, Release Successful Products, and Increase Agility." See www.jrothman.com for all her books.

  Agile   PMO   Strategy  

What do you use a project management office for? Here are several traditional ways organizations use PMOs:

• To offer each project advice on the most useful lifecycle or agile approach. When I see that, I feel as if the PMO is micromanaging the teams, telling them how to work.
• Project portfolio management: choose which projects to fund, transform, or kill. But when a PMO makes strategy decisions, too often the senior leaders change that strategy. That means the PMO creates additional hierarchy that leads to longer decision times for everyone. Longer decision times decreases overall agility.
• Train the project and program managers. However, too few PMO members actively manage projects anymore. How can they train other people, especially when each project’s need for agility is different?

As a result, I rarely recommend a PMO for any organization that wants agility.

Yet, I have seen an agile PMO model that can work for organizations that want to increase their agility. That’s where the PMO offers advice and support—a consulting role—to enable faster decisions with fewer and shorter feedback loops.

Here’s what that looks like:

1. Start with the strategy and project portfolio issues to support faster portfolio decisions.
2. Continue with creating an ongoing community of practice for anyone involved in leading or managing projects.
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