Building Your PMO for Fun and Profit

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.

  PMO   Scope Management   Strategy  

PMOs form a large part of my business. A lot of my clients ask me for help and guidance in improving their existing PMOs or to help them create a PMO model that supports their business needs. I would like to think that I get these calls because I am the “go to” person when it comes to this sort of work, but the truth is that the main reason that PMOs form such a large part of the work that I do is that many organizations have problems with their PMOs--they simply aren’t getting the benefits that they expect.

There are a lot of different reasons for this, but one of the recurring themes that I hear is a sense that the organization doesn't feel as though the PMO is delivering value to the organization, or if it is delivering value they aren’t sure where and how much. When I start working with those organizations and I speak with the project managers that the PMO supports, I frequently hear a different set of concerns. PMs don’t feel as though the PMO is providing them with support and guidance--often the complaint is that the PMO is adding overhead and bureaucracy to the PM’s job without adding any value to their environment.

This is clearly a major problem--if so many PMOs are seen as lacking in value by both the organization that they work within and the PMs that they support, then their days are numbered. So what’s the …

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