The PMO: A Time for Change

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   Portfolio Management   Strategy  

One of the great things about our profession is the absence of certainty. There are no guarantees, not definitive “right” or “wrong” ways, and lots of ways to get to a good end solution. For that reason, I very rarely criticize perspectives I don’t agree with--I recognize they may be just as valid as my own, they’re just different.

However, I recently read a blog post on “Trends for the PMO in 2016” that I had to react to. At this time of year there are a lot of such articles, and they provide insight into different organizations’ and industries’ views on where PMOs are headed. This one was different--it contained a lot of trends that were (in my opinion) at least two years too late--PMOs aspiring to those goals would be falling behind.

I’m not going to call the author out here; that’s not what I want to focus on. But I did comment on Twitter. I then figured if I was going to criticize, I must also be prepared to offer my own thoughts. I did that in a brief entry on LinkedIn that generated a lot of comments, so I want to expand on it here and potentially start some further dialogue among this audience of experts. Please share your thoughts--especially if you disagree--and let’s help one another out with some debate to advance PMOs.

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