5 Steps Toward PMO Success

Kevin Kern serves as Innotas' President and CEO, leveraging his 20 years of operational experience with high-growth software companies. Innotas is a leading provider of Cloud Solutions for IT Management.

  Governance   PMO   Strategy  

Ideally, it’s a centralized hub for organizing processes, managing special projects and facilitating the free flow of information across your enterprise. The ultimate Project Management Office (PMO) is a model of defined and aligned processes, with results tracking and transparency to match. Try these tips for project management success.

1. Make business processes defined—and repeatable.
Bringing in a project on time and on budget once is a combination of good project management and a little bit of luck; consistently executing projects successfully, time after time, is a hallmark of PMO perfection. Take an opportunity to explicitly define your processes as they stand today. Often, things are simply done the way they’ve always been done, without defining the steps and desired outcomes. Worse--and possibly more commonly--different people do different things in different ways, each time.

Get a handle on what happens and how, then weed out those that don’t work consistently. Finally, ensure that the rest are truly replicable. In doing so, you’ll join good company: A growing number of businesses now have formal Project Portfolio Management (PPM) processes in place, rising from 64% in 2003 to 71% in 2013. (Source: The State of Project Portfolio Management PPM 2013 PM Solutions Research.)

2. Break down departmental silos.
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