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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.

  Business Case   Communications Management   PMO   Strategy   Talent Management  

Previously, I looked at how new project managers could be welcomed into the PMO and helped through the learning curve that it entails. In this article, I want to look at the work that the PMO can do to help another group of people understand how the PMO operates: project stakeholders.

I see a lot of parallels here--we have to help new project managers understand how our specific PMO is structured and operates in order for them to be as productive as possible as quickly as possible. We also have to help other areas of the organization understand the role of the PMO and how to work with it in order to maximize the return on the investment.

What is your story?
Before you can communicate to the organization what the PMO does and how it can assist the various organizational groups, you have to be clear on that yourself. That might sound obvious, but it’s not sufficient to know what it is the PMO does--you have to understand and communicate why that matters to the various areas of the business. Why should they care about the PMO?

There are many different PMO structures and stakeholders who have dealt with PMOs in the past that may have incorrect assumptions about the function of your PMO. You need to remove these misconceptions and replace them with accurate statements about the PMO’s role and what that means to them.

PMOs are very good at explaining …

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