Marketing the PMO: A Major Mistake?

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.

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Topics: Marketing and Sales, PMO

I’ve recently seen an increase in the number of people talking about the importance of marketing the PMO. They argue that it’s important for the organization to understand how the PMO operates and how it delivers value to the organization.

That seems profoundly wrong to me. Yet when I posted on social media that I didn’t believe that PMOs should be focused on marketing, I received a number of responses strongly disagreeing with me.

If there are that many different opinions (some of them very strong), it seems like this is a good topic for further exploration. So here are my thoughts—whether you agree or (especially) disagree, I would love to hear your thoughts in the comments. Let me start by making some differentiation between different types of marketing messaging.

I am sure marketing professionals will roll their eyes at my overly simplistic categorization, but I see two types of marketing activities being carried out by PMOs:

1. The “Aren’t we wonderful?” approach where the PMO tells anyone who will listen about its many successes. This is about what the PMO has achieved and is generally light on details of how those achievements occurred.
2. The “Here’s what we do…” approach, where the PMO informs anyone who will listen of what it does to support the organization. This often includes information …

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