What Do Your PMs Think of Your 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.

  Communications Management   PMO   Risk Management   Talent Management  

A few years ago, I got a phone call from an executive who had just received the results of their latest employee engagement survey. You know the kind of thing--how satisfied people are at work, what they think of the company, etc. The results for the PMO were terrible, among the worst within the entire company--people who reported to the PMO felt that they weren’t respected, that they weren’t engaged in what was going on and that they weren’t working in a positive environment.

What was really concerning the executive the most was that the PMO had been performing to a high level--they had been given some tough targets in the previous financial year and had met them. The executive was having a tough time reconciling the objective performance against the results of the employee engagement survey and was looking for some help in understanding what was going on.

We spent quite some time looking at the PMO, and what we discovered probably identifies some areas that you may also want to look at in your own organization.

The process
I sat down with the executive and looked at the key metrics that we had available to us--the detailed performance figures from the previous year as well as the survey results. We agreed that with hindsight there may have been a couple of early warning signs--turnover was up last year, but that could easily have been an …

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