Is the PMO Serving Your Organization?

Brad Egeland is an IT/project management consultant and author with over 25 years of software development, management and project management experience leading initiatives in manufacturing, government contracting, gaming and hospitality, retail operations, aviation and airline, pharmaceutical, start-ups, healthcare, higher education, not-for-profit, high-tech, engineering and general IT.

  PMO  

Rewind a few years back in my professional career. I used to think that any organization that was dedicated enough to plan out and assemble a project management office was truly at the forefront of project management and had it “together”. And those organizations I was in that were just forming PMOs? Well, they were progressive and I commended them for jumping on board and making it official.

Looking back--at least from my experience--the PMOs in those organizations didn’t really seem to have an affect either way on the successes or failures of the projects in their portfolio. At least I can’t say for sure that any projects truly benefited from the existence of a project management office. Project success rates certainly weren’t higher in PMO organizations. Project managers weren’t happier or more secure in their positions.

I’m not certain I can really say that PMs benefited from structure and repeatable processes that you would hope to see implemented. In some cases they were actually there, but other shortcomings of the PMO and leadership would tend to get in the way. None really had all the ingredients of a successful PMO working together at the same time and in the same place.

What was the result? In more than one case, the result was the eventual dismantling of the PMO--which often resulted in great frustrations for …

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