Is Your PMO Maligned or Aligned?

Wayne leads product marketing for Oracle | Primavera and previously served as VP of Marketing for cloud PPM leader Instantis before it was acquired by Oracle.

  Governance   PMO   ProjectsAtWork  

Contrary to a recent report, PMO longevity doesn't lead to greater success; PMO success leads to longevity. And PMOs that thrive share fundamental commonalities of alignment, from culture to customer, that they start getting right early in their existence. Here are six ways your PMO needs to be aligned.

I recently read what I found to be an amusing reference from a survey on PMO effectiveness conducted jointly by CIO.com and the Project Management Institute. This survey concluded that the longer a PMO is in existence, the greater the results. It went on to report that of those surveyed, only 37 percent of companies that had a PMO in place for under a year encountered increased success rates of any kind. Conversely, those companies with a PMO in existence for over four years experienced a 65 percent increase in success rates.

Excuse me, but isn't this a little like saying that a baseball pitcher who is still in the game in the 7th inning has a better chance of winning than one who hasn't finished the first inning yet? Or, if you prefer, it's like saying that anything with a track record of survival has a better chance of surviving than anything that has no track record.

Let's not try to read some kind of magical “Ah Hah!” moment into this data. PMOs that thrive and prosper share some fundamental commonalities that are as …

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