PMOs Get Down to Business

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   ProjectsAtWork  

PMOs must be held accountable by their organizations, with business-focused goals and plans to achieve them. They must also drive training to develop the business acumen of project leaders, while facilitating the collaboration with sponsors and executives that provides business context for decision-making, changing priorities and benefits realization.

The history of project management offices (PMOs) is a rather checked one. There are organizations that have implemented PMOs with tremendous success and have been able to improve project execution dramatically because of the work their PMO has carried out. However, there are also organizations that have completely abandoned the concept of PMOs because of repeated failures to deliver the expected results. For most organizations the reality is somewhere in between those two extremes, but that’s hardly a ringing endorsement.

Any department should be able to clearly demonstrate that it is delivering value to the organization sufficient to justify the cost of that department, and many PMOs are simply unable to do that. There are many reasons for this inability, some of which are the responsibility of the organization, and some are the responsibility of the PMO. So how PMOs can improve, especially in the context of the expanded portfolio management role that many are now being asked to play.

What is a PMO and why does …

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