The Post-Launch PMO Blues

Abid Mustafa is a seasoned professional with 18 years' experience in the IT and telecommunications industry, specializing in enhancing corporate performance through the establishment and operation of executive PMOs and delivering tangible benefits through the management of complex transformation programs and projects.

  Governance   PMO   ProjectsAtWork  

Management consultants are being called on to help establish project management offices that are simply not equipped to succeed after they leave. Here are three things they’re doing wrong.

Having worked in the (Middle East-North Africa) MENA region for a number of years, it is quite disheartening to encounter PMOs that suffer from acute identity crisis and are locked in endless battles with other departments to prove their worth. What is interesting to discover is that the usual culprit behind PMO failures, i.e. the lack of executive support, is not the primary cause. The common denominator behind the failings of such PMOs can be attributed to the role played by management consultants in setting up PMOs.

There are three distinct areas where management consultants have played an instrumental role in creating PMOs, with major structural defects and no matter how hard one tries to fix it, the defects remain as an indelible stain.

1. Sowing the seeds of executive confusion

There is a perpetual confusion in the minds of the executive team about the roles, responsibilities and competencies of the PMO. This is borne by the fact that in most cases, the management consultants hired to launch a company or a new business line, focussed exclusively on establishing a PMO that exhibited the characteristics of a reporting function and nothing more.  In this …

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