Four Simple Targets for Establishing a Project Management Office

Establishing  a project management office (PMO) today is considered one step forward in the maturity level of an organization, but is having a PMO really an advantage for a company? In addition, which services really bring an added value, compared with the ones that simply increase the workloads of project managers without delivering any useful and/or usable piece of information?

While being involved in newly set up project offices, and responsible for putting together one of them (with a regional and then global geographic scopes), I often wondered this myself.

Nobody can question the fact that having a centralized source of information, templates, resources (i.e., project and portfolio managers), and methodologies would bring added value; nonetheless, in multiple companies with a PMO, the perceptions of the employees (customers) is more related to an overhead rather than a useful service. Why?

I believe the main reasons can be summarized in the following points:

• Use of a “one-size-fits-all” approach, implementing a PMO by following exactly what the books say, without considering the organization in which it should operate
• No clear boundaries and objectives associated with the project management office
• Too complex requirements of the project managers, which produce data that are very rarely used or consulted
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