Showing PMO Value Through Reporting

Reporting  the results of what your PMO achieves helps define the value that your PMO provides. Here are some tips on how to produce meaningful reports for a variety of audiences. Note that in this article, “PMO” can mean project, program or portfolio management office.

Your organization has an existing or newly established PMO. You need to produce reports showing the organizational value of the PMO. Where do you begin?

The eventual reports you produce depend on a range of considerations:

• Is the PMO a project management office, a program management office, a portfolio management office, or a hybrid of these?
• Is the domain of the PMO a functional area like IT or new product development or is it enterprise-wide?
• What is the nature of the services the PMO provides? For example, does the PMO manage projects, provide project management consulting and mentoring, develop project and program management standards or methodologies, provide training, disseminate best practices, or maintain or support a hierarchy of portfolios, etc?
• Are you expected to report on portfolio-oriented metrics, individual project- or program-related metrics, all of the value elements of the PMO (e.g., the return on investment [ROI] from the infrastructure costs vs. the benefits achieved in project throughput), or some combination of these?
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