PMO Success Measures--A Proposed Model

Mark Mullaly is president of Interthink Consulting Incorporated, an organizational development and change firm specializing in the creation of effective organizational project management solutions. Since 1990, it has worked with companies throughout North America to develop, enhance and implement effective project management tools, processes, structures and capabilities. Mark was most recently co-lead investigator of the Value of Project Management research project sponsored by PMI. You can read more of his writing at markmullaly.com.

  PMO  

In my last column, we discussed the challenges of defining and demonstrating the success of the PMO, and the failure of many organizations to clearly articulate what success looks like. I pointed out that success measures would vary for each organization, depending upon the role and approach being taken in implementing a PMO. Developing a framework for evaluating success really brings together all of the dimensions of defining a PMO that we have discussed up until now: its role, purpose, structure and the objectives that have been established for it.

This month, we take a departure from the norm by actually proposing a measurement model. It is important to note that this framework is not intended to be universal, nor should an organization adopt it wholesale. It is intended only as an example and illustration of the principles that were initially defined last time, to provide a working demonstration of what the measures of success for a PMO could look like.

For the sake of example, let's assume that an organization is establishing a PMO to support projects within its IT organization with the following mandate:

• co-ordinate centralized tracking and reporting of project progress, in order to provide a single and consolidated view of projects
• serve as a center of excellence in defining and promoting project management practices, and …

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