The PMO of the Future

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 have written a lot in the last few years about how PMOs are evolving, becoming more aligned with strategy execution, and moving away from traditional governance and reporting functions. I’ve suggested that this trend will continue, that EPMOs will morph into SPMOs (strategic), and so on. But what I haven’t done is looked beyond these immediate trends. So, in this piece, I want to look further into the future—I want to consider what PMOs will look like 10 years from now.

Why a decade? Well, it’s close enough to imagine that it might have some resemblance to the functions that exist today, and far enough away that it will need to be more than simply an evolved form of what’s occurring now. (And it’s far enough into the future that hopefully everyone will have forgotten about this piece and not bring it back to haunt me in 2032!)

There will be PMOs
Let’s start by saying that there will be PMOs in 2032. They may have a different label (more on that later), but they will still be the function that helps ensure that discretionary work is delivered as effectively as possible for organizations. I am more confident that organizations will have PMOs 10 years from now than I am that they will have them one year from now.

That’s because today, some organizations still don’t appreciate the value that PMOs can bring in terms …

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