The xMO Shouldn’t Replace the 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  

In the last few years, PMOs have begun to be reimagined in many industries and organizations. They are being given a more strategic focus, and asked to help deliver meaningful business value through optimization of the project delivery environment. The specifics of what that means change over time and from one enterprise to the next, but it’s an important—and necessary—shift.

As part of this change, many organizations have been rebranding the PMO function with names like Value Management Office, Strategy Execution Office, and countless other similar labels and related acronyms. PMI have adopted the xMO moniker as a bit of a catchall where the x can represent any number of different things.

These new functions have been getting a lot of attention, and I think that many of them have been delivering considerable value to their employers. But there seems to be a sense that these new functions will ultimately be a complete replacement of the PMO. I don’t see it that way, I see it as an expansion—and that xMOs and PMOs need to coexist.

Distinct functions
I don’t want this article to focus on simply labelling or naming conventions, and I recognize that different names will be used in different organizations. But I see two distinct “PMO-like” functions being required in most enterprises:

• The xMO, or whatever name that it …

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