Preventing the Constant Creation of ‘New’ PMOs

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.

  Organizational Project Management   PMO   Strategy  

Anyone who has been involved in PMOs for any length of time will likely have experienced the shutting down of a PMO—or its reinvention as some kind of new entity. It sometimes seems as though a PMO life cycle has to include some regular destruction (perhaps self-destruction) and re-emergence from the ashes before it can be considered a success (a PMO leader described it to me once as a “rite of passage”). This can’t be the best way to build and evolve our PMOs. I hope we can agree on that, so we need to find the root cause and implement some solutions.

What causes the PMO restart cycle?
If you think of any other business function in an organization, the idea of disbanding and/or recreating the function is ludicrous. A sales department will never be disbanded if the sales targets aren’t met; instead, the leadership will be replaced and a new strategy will be sought. The very concept is ridiculous because everyone understands that an organization requires a sales team to operate successfully.

The fact that closing a PMO is even an option suggests that organizational leadership don’t view the function as critical to success—and that’s a problem. Before we explore that further, let’s also recognize that PMOs aren’t just closed; most are reformed again after a relatively short absence. The implication of that is …

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