Paul, great post..! And your question was a topic of much discussion in IQPC's 2007 PMO Summit held earlier this year in Miami, Florida. The format of the IQPC PMO Summit primarily featured two conference days of "large company" PMO manager presentations. The topics were very insightful and all of the PMO managers did an outstanding job relating the business drivers, problems, and challenges they faced and, in particular, the PMO strategies that worked best for them.
One of many take-away points that seemed to resonate at the end of the conference was that these large company PMOs tended to have an emerging PMO architecture that consisted of a couple of key components to the PMO architecture as opposed to the approach of trying to provision all of these "PMO things" into a single component such as a PPM vendor application suite:
- Project Management Tooling
- PPM Application Tool Suites (ITG, Clarity, Planview, Project Server, etc.)
- Desktop (Project Professional, Open Workbench, etc.)
- Collaboration and Document Management
- Collaboration Application (Lotus, SharePoint, Documentum, etc.)
- Teamsites (PMO, Programs, Large Projects, etc.)
- PMO Content Assets (Vendor and/or in-house developed)
- Processes and templates (PM, SDLC, Agile, Change Management)
- Policies, Compliance
- PMO Dashboards and Scorecards, etc.
- Knowledge Assets (Training, Mentoring, Presentations, Podcasts, Wikis, etc.)
For those PMOs represented in the conference, it seemed that a key part of the PMO strategy was to establish the overall architecture and that the PMO architecture, in essence, represented the ideal "best fit" environment for PM within the organization. Some of the presenters also suggested that this whole concept of "PMO Content Assets" was all about PMO 2.0. PMO guru Terry Doescher, of Planview, who happened to be in attendance gave some very good insights into PMO 2.0 and discussed how many PMOs are transitioning and evolving from a PM Center of Excellence (PMCoE) mindset to a process oriented PMO 2.0 mindset bringing together all of those things into a single PMO "execution" instance where the PPM tool is no doubt the core component of the PMO architecture along with other components as, or if, needed.
Great post, I hope we hear from others on this topic..!
