A Different View on PMOs

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.

  Agile   PMO  

A report came across my desk the other day that has really made me think. It’s entitled “The Global State of the PMO, An Analysis for 2013” and it was commissioned by ESI International. The training company has looked at the PMO from the perspective of leadership and development--specifically the effect of training on workplace performance and on learning sustainment.

I’ve got a little bit of experience with corporate training, so I wasn’t surprised to see that the report suggested that organizations that invested in these areas saw greater success than those that didn’t. However, some of the other report findings did surprise me, and that’s what I want to explore a little bit here. The report was fairly substantial with over 2,300 respondents from every corner of the globe, so there is every reason to believe that the figures reflect at least the perception of the people who responded if not the reality (almost two-thirds of respondents were portfolio, program or project managers rather than direct PMO staff--which represented only 19%).

“Much Agile About Nothing”
That is the heading of one of the sections of the report that suggests that agile isn’t taking off as much as we might think. The survey suggested that only around 2 in 5 of the organizations represented by the survey (42%) used agile methods to…

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