The 'What' and 'Why' of 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.

  Estimating   Governance   PMO  

In the last few years, I have spent a lot of time writing and speaking about the importance of project managers focusing on the benefits their projects will deliver. Put another way, I believe PMs and their teams need to focus less on “what” gets delivered and more on “why” those deliverables are important—the revenue created by a new product rather than the product itself, for example. That same concept should also apply to PMOs, and that’s what I want to explore in this article.

In many ways, the PMO should find it easier to focus on the benefits delivered by its work—the PMO should exist to improve the quality of project execution within the organization or business area it is accountable for. That should put the focus directly on the results achieved by the work the PMO does, but too often the work becomes routine and the reason for the work is forgotten.

Consider for example the staple of project reporting. In many organizations, the PMO functions as a consolidator of project status information. Multiple reports are received and are distilled into a summary for leadership, which may result in each project getting nothing more than a line in a table with very basic information based on a traffic light or similar model.

This does nothing to deliver value to the organization. It simply “squeezes” information into …

Please log in or sign up below to read the rest of the article.