PMOs: Moving Beyond the Project Resource Pool

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.

  Business Case   Communications Management   PMO   Portfolio Management   Strategy  

In a number of articles over the last year or so, I have talked about the need for portfolio management to begin with idea creation. There is also an increasingly significant trend in portfolio execution to look for end-to-end portfolio management--from idea creation to benefits realization. This all makes a lot of sense, but I recently received an e-mail asking a pretty fundamental question: “If the portfolio starts with the idea creation process, then how does the PMO engage people beyond the reach of traditional project execution so that their ideas are captured?”

They went on to explain that in their organization, the PMO was responsible for portfolio management--but it was seen as “the project group” and anybody involved in a day-to-day operational role had no connection with the group at all. The individual who e-mailed me was concerned that this would result in a lot of potentially great ideas being lost because of a disconnect between those groups and the start of the portfolio management process--the capturing of ideas and development of business cases. I suspect that there are a number of organizations in that position, so it seems like a good topic to try and address in an article.

The concept of idea generation in portfolio management
It’s one thing to have a policy of trying to capture ideas from all employees, and …

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