Save the PMO!

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.

  Business Case   Governance   PMO   Strategy  

Do C-level executives make arbitrary decisions to kill PMOs? Alarming as this idea may seem, many organizations nowadays are building up a track record in terminating the services of their PMOs right after kicking the tires. What motivates these decision-makers to pull the plug on such governance groups designed to provide business value to an organization?

The answer is simple--they stopped providing any business value whatsoever. Most PMOs focus their efforts in tightening up the processes and procedures, thereby unintentionally forgetting the business drivers that they were supposed to enhance. Based on a study done by The Hackett Group, it was found that organizations that had sparingly used their PMOs experienced 32% lower operating costs as compared to the ones who had full-fledged PMOs. This presents a serious case against setting up resource-heavy PMOs without recognizing the organizational issues that they are supposed to address.

The myth debunked
Can setting up a fully functional PMO automatically increase an organization’s ability to deliver projects on schedule, on budget and with desired quality? The Hackett Group’s study reveals that organizations that had low utilization of their PMOs demonstrated virtually identical ability to deliver projects effectively as organizations that relied heavily on their PMOs. So, the question remains: Why …

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