PMOs Spend Too Much Time Looking Backward

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 what has happened on projects.”

Those were the first words that a CEO said to me when I spoke to him about some challenges that he was having with his PMO. He went on to elaborate: “The past has gone. I can’t change it, and I don’t want to invest a lot of money in a PMO that focuses on telling me all about it using fancy PowerPoints.”

He has a good point, even if he was being a little overly dramatic. It highlights a challenge that exists in a lot of PMOs, one that is not being addressed often enough—even as PMOs are being reinvented to focus on areas that have the potential to be more valuable.

Put simply: PMOs spend too much time looking backward, and not enough time looking forward.

What are we trying to do?
To begin, consider the purpose of a PMO. It has to be to improve the quality of project delivery.

That means very different things to different organizations. But regardless of whether the focus is on scheduling, risk management, resource management, work methods or any combination of hundreds of other variables, a PMO succeeds if—as a result of its efforts—future projects have a better chance of success than previous ones.

In other words, the PMO has to be looking forward, thinking about what changes can be made that will result in greater levels of success.

But too many PMOs…

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