Is 'PMO' a Dirty Word?

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   Strategy  

I was recently talking to a customer about implementing a strategic PMO for their organization. They had ideas about what it should do—management of the portfolio, support for various departmental PMOs, value reporting for all project delivery methods.

They wanted my views on those proposed accountabilities, along with any additional areas of responsibility that I thought would be appropriate for them. They were optimistic that they were on the right path and didn’t expect me to have too many concerns or proposed changes.

Reading that brief summary, I suspect that many of you might think they are probably headed in the right direction as well—and certainly the areas of focus that they identified would help to add value to the organization. But they told me they wanted to implement a strategic PMO, and there’s not much strategic about the things they’ve identified.

Sure, you could argue that portfolio management is a strategic discipline, and it can be. In fact, it should be. But this customer viewed portfolio management as an activity that only involved the management of in-flight initiatives from within the portfolio—it was a consolidation and reporting effort with a little bit of an “early warning system” for problems built in.

That’s a good example of the concerns I had with their approach to their proposed …

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