What’s Your MO?

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  

PMI, in conjunction with PwC, recently launched a report about The Evolution of PMOs. It’s generated a fair amount of discussion on different social media sites, and as you might imagine, I haven’t been shy in offering my opinion.

In this article, I want to explore the idea of the name of the function. I have been working in, and with, PMOs for a quarter of a century now (I started very, very young), and for all those years I have heard the jokes—that PMO stood for “P… Me Off” (long before texting was a thing), or “Project Manager’s Obituary,” and so on.

I have been told by executives that they can’t have PMOs in their organization because the name carries a stigma, so they have to call it something else. And I have seen the confusion around whether the “P” was for project, program, product, portfolio or all of the above.

More recently, I have seen organizations seek to rebrand PMOs to better reflect the role that they are taking on in the organization. As project delivery has evolved to become more focused on enabling business value to be achieved, so the PMO is expected to ensure that the project delivery environment is optimized for that to occur. That means working more around benefits and value—and in more progressive organizations, it means contributing at the more strategic-level …

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