PMO Alignment to Company Strategy: A Two-Way Street

Graham Campbell, PMP, is a Global Vice President with EPPM expertise, focused on driving improved business performance. He is a member of the PMI Mile-Hi Chapter.

  Leadership   Organizational Project Management   PMO  

A few years ago, I was asked by executive leadership to lead an assignment to improve the company’s project delivery function. Creating a project management office (PMO) and aligning activities to the company’s strategy were important early steps in this improvement process. What I didn’t anticipate was the proactive role that the PMO, once established, would later play in a feedback loop to further evolving our company strategy.

Our organization—around 7,500 staff in 29 countries—executed mainly engineering projects for external clients. We primarily organized our technical expertise to develop and design solutions for private and municipal entities, often as part of their capital investment plan.

There were several key data points though (many external, including client feedback) pointing to some significant failings in our project delivery—nothing, however, that could not be successfully addressed by implementing an enterprise project portfolio management (EPPM) approach.

The well-documented components of EPPM focus on the centralized management of practices, processes and tools used by project managers to provide data that supports transparency necessary for improvement. By successfully governing these aspects of project delivery, together with a significant focus on project manager competency, we were able to develop valuable …

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