PMO: Collaborate or Perish

Jiju ‘Jay’ Nair is a Senior Manager with Fannie Mae driving Cloud Transformation and adoption. He is an avid advocate for using innovative project and process management principles for building reliable and sustainable products.

  Communications Management   Governance   PMO   Portfolio Management  

The ultimate goal for any Project Management Office is simple--facilitate business growth. It might be hard to imagine a PMO delivering a direct business value. However, many experienced project and program managers point out that a high-performing PMO that positions itself outside a specific organizational group (e.g., information technology) achieves greater independence and gains senior management sponsorship. Such high-performing PMOs effectively integrate business benefits into the organization’s project management lifecycle and report these benefits repeatedly. Moreover, decision-makers can tap into the PMO’s portfolio management tools to create, adjust or turn back business decisions.

Is it practically possible to create such high-performing PMOs? The answer depends on an organization’s commitment and maturity to recognize their PMO’s capability to add to business growth. A PMO’s paramount responsibility is to continuously deliver successful projects in a repeatable, uniform manner that can be measured and reported clearly. When the dust settles on the question of how to make PMOs deliver successful projects, only one question remains: How effective was the level of collaboration between a project manager, other shared groups and the Project Management Office?

Trusting the PMO
The important element that drives collaboration …

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