Why 'EPMO' Does Not Mean 'Strategic PMO'

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.

  PMO   Strategy  

In the last few months, I have reached out to a few organizations that I know have implemented EPMOs to see how they were getting on with them. I was a little surprised at some of the comments and thought that it was worth discussing here.

One of the things that struck me was how similar some of the concerns were between PMOs and EPMOs. I have often heard executives complain about not being sure that they are getting an appropriate return on investment from various department-level PMOs, and that was again reiterated by several of the executives that I spoke to about EPMOs. Those executives were hopeful that a single, corporate-based entity responsible for project execution would make it easier for the benefits of the function to become clear, but that wasn’t the case for them.

Another common complaint was that the creation of an EPMO hadn’t resulted in an increase in the quality of project execution. The expectation had been that a central function would drive best practices and result in greater project success than had been achieved with department PMOs. Some executives commented that they were in fact seeing the opposite result--project failure rates were increasing, and they were considering abandoning the entire concept of a PMO.

You don’t get what you want--just what you build!
One of the things that became extremely clear to me after …

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