How Much Should the PMO Head Be Paid?

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   Career Development   Communications Management   PMO   Strategy   Talent Management  

Well that heading got your attention, didn’t it? I’ll let you off early--if you are just looking for a financial figure, I’m not going to provide one. Instead, I want to look at what benefit the PMO--and in particular the person running the PMO--brings to the organization. I am well aware that there isn’t always a direct connection between the value that someone drives and the amount that they are paid, and I don’t want to turn this into an article on office politics. Instead, let’s look at how an organization benefits--and perhaps that will lead to some thoughts about whether the PMO leader is fairly compensated.

How do we establish value?
I have had countless discussions with people over the years about how we measure the effectiveness of a PMO. The argument is always that we don’t know how effective the organization would have been at executing projects without the PMO, so we don’t know what the baseline is that we are comparing performance against. That’s fair to a degree, but over time we should be able to show improvements. At the micro-scale, that may be an increasing percentage compliance with project methodology elements (following process without short cuts, completing templates accurately, etc.). If we don’t believe that processes help overall project performance, then why do we have them? At a …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.