Rethinking the ‘O’ in 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.

  Governance   PMO  

There has been a lot written recently about the formal aspects of PMOs, how they need to support the organization in its achievement of goals and objectives, how the PMO needs to demonstrate value, etc. I firmly believe that these are important elements for the PMO (you don’t have to look too far on ProjectManagement.com to find articles by me saying as much), but I also believe that there is another role that is in danger of getting lost with the current focus on corporate value and strategic leadership.

That other function is the idea of creating an environment for the growth and support of project execution within the organization. In this article, I want to spend a little time considering some of those elements, shifting the focus away from the “office” part and more on the project management part of PMO.

Project management and the PMO
Every PMO is unique and will have a slightly different mandate from its organization in terms of the specific elements that it is expected to manage. But at a foundational level, all PMOs should exist to support the project management community. For “center of excellence” style PMOs, there may be more obvious focus on that support because the PMO is all about best practices, coaching and mentoring; but the function should be no less important in a PMO that has formal portfolio management …

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