Organizational Change Management and the PMO

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.

  Change Management   Organizational Project Management   PMO  

Projects are vehicles for delivering change. If an organization wants to start doing something, change something it already does or even stop doing something, it approves a project. That project will deliver and create a new baseline for what an organization does until the next change comes along.

Of course, projects can’t exist in isolation when it comes to delivering these changes. There is also the process of getting them integrated with operations—taking the new system, process, product or whatever and ensuring it’s adopted effectively and efficiently.

That’s the larger discipline of organizational change management, and it incorporates many different elements—from preparation and training, through supporting people experiencing change, to validation that improvements have occurred. Projects are the raw materials that organizational change management deals with, but their work bridges the gap between projects and operations. My question is simple: If projects—and by extension PMOs—are about change (and they are), why don’t PMOs have a bigger role to play in organizational change management?

On paper, they are an ideal function to engage in the process (if not to own the entire thing), yet that rarely (if ever) happens. In this article, I want to look at why that is and consider whether PMOs should play a bigger role …

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