PMOs: A New Perspective on the Past

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  

Project management is a data-driven discipline. As project managers, we spend a lot of time developing, updating and processing data in order to get a better understanding of what’s going on in our projects. In recent years, that data has fueled more powerful software to provide practical support in the form of automation, proactive alerts and generally reduce the amount of administrative work PMs are faced with.

But there has been another data-driven advancement that I believe project management—and PMOs in particular PMOs—need to take better advantage of, and that’s the insight that can be provided by business intelligence (BI) tools.

Most large organizations now use at least one of these platforms (sometimes several), and they are starting to become more accessible to smaller organizations. To greatly oversimplify things, they are pieces of analytical software that sit on top of a data warehouse and allow users to get a much better understanding of what has happened, and is happening, in their business by providing views of that data that have never previously been available.

In recent years, there have been a number of advancements that have made these tools more popular. They have become easier for end users to use (instead of requiring technical staff to query the data) and they have leveraged the emerging disciplines of augmented …

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