Do Departmental PMOs Have a Future?

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  

Earlier this year I wrote an article questioning whether organizations should still be enabling line of business projects. That led to some conversations around whether or not departmental PMOs have a future—or whether they will end up becoming redundant as more work ends up being driven from a central, strategically focused PMO (or PMO-like function).

The arguments for and against
Whenever this has come up in the past, my immediate response was to suggest that departmental PMOs were an essential part of the PMO infrastructure. They were closest to where work was being done and provided a hub for communications and understanding between portfolio management and strategic PMO work (and the delivery of projects, epics, etc. at the team level.)

But as more and more discretionary work is driven from the top of the organization down, will that still hold true?

There is likely to be a shift toward a more centralized, dedicated pool of resources who are exclusively committed to the delivery of discretionary work. Agile, and the stable teams that are one of the core principles of that approach, have already made it less common for individuals to move between operational and project work. A similar shift is occurring in plan-driven work as the number of projects increases and the benefit of people with experience in similar or related work is acknowledged.

Currently, …

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