Making the Most of Your PMO

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   Strategy  

We need to bring further clarity to the role of a PMO when it comes to driving value to the business, and in contributing to the strategic planning and decision-making process. To truly address the problem will require enterprise-level changes.

Specifically, I want to explore what business leaders can do to create an environment where PMOs can contribute optimally to the strategic planning process, and where that contribution will be accepted willingly by other stakeholders. At the heart of the ability to do that is the need for clarity.

PMO clarity
Historically, PMOs were not very well understood, or they were misunderstood. Ask someone in an organization what the PMO did, and they likely didn’t have much idea. If they had some experience, then there might be a partial answer like “reporting” or “governance.” But ask 10 people that same question, and you would probably get ten different answers, often with not a lot of overlap.

In many cases, that wasn’t just a lack of understanding of what the role was, it was a fundamental failure to provide the PMO with a defined purpose. I know of many PMO leaders from the past who simply had no clue what they were supposed to be doing. You can argue that they should have worked with leadership to figure that out, and they should. But how many other departments have to work with leadership to …

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