Annual Planning in the PMO

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   PMO   Portfolio Management   Strategy  

When the end of the year approaches, are you prepared? Determining budgets for different areas of the business, reviewing project proposals and business cases and making decisions on where to invest the organization’s resources in the coming 12 months can be particularly stressful if you aren’t prepared.

Some of those decisions are easy--the continuation of multi-year initiatives approved in previous years, the base funding that is required to maintain operations, etc. Some of those are much more difficult, and that’s why annual planning is dreaded by so many department heads and cost center owners.

Recently, one of my customers commented that annual planning for the PMO must be very easy--and that’s what has prompted me to write this article (I hope that the person who made the comment reads it!).

“But you don’t have to do anything!”
The logic for the PMO having an easy time of annual planning is that they are a service function that provides resources based on the overall project portfolio. The argument goes that the organization determines which projects to approve, and based on those decisions the PMO knows how it needs to adjust its resource model.

There is some logic to that from a pure project execution standpoint--if you are doubling the investment in projects from one year to the next, then it’s a …

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