PMO Business Planning
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.
I guess that I should start this article by asking the most basic question--do you have a business plan for your PMO? If you answered “no”, don’t worry (too much)--you aren’t alone. Many organizations (perhaps most) don’t see the PMO as a department that needs to have a business plan, instead relying on it to oversee its project and/or project management-related activities with a vague goal of “delivering improvements”.
For many organizations, that’s historic--the PMO was created from a need to consolidate project reporting and to standardize the organization’s project management approach, so it was never envisaged as a business department, rather, it was an “overlay” function for project management. Over the last few years, the idea of a PMO as a more business-focused function has grown and become much more widely accepted. But if your PMO wasn’t created in that way, it often finds itself ill equipped to perform that role--and hence no business plan.
Obviously there are many different PMO models, and an organization might have not only multiple PMOs, it might have multiple types of PMO--a center of excellence type; line-of-business PMOs looking after departmental projects; a PMO with accountability for the strategic portfolio, etc. All of these PMOs should have their own business plan, and there…
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"Impartial observers from other planets would consider ours an utterly bizarre enclave if it were populated by birds, defined as flying animals, that nevertheless rarely or never actually flew. They would also be perplexed if they encountered in our seas, lakes, rivers and ponds, creatures defined as swimmers that never did any swimming. But they would be even more surprised to encounter a species defined as a thinking animal if, in fact, the creature very rarely indulged in actual thinking." - Steve Allen |
