Why PMO, Benefits of setting up PMO

Samuel, thanks for your reply. The idea here is to know success stories of PMs, who have been part of PMO. The ideal way of explaining can be by sharing a business case, and how it was achieved. To make it simple to understand and reply, here is one of my past experience. e.g. in one of my previous organization, having project managers were not a common practice, the business objective was to have CMMI certification to increase the sales prospects and better reach to the market. In order t achieve this, it was realized that PMs can play a crucial role in standardizing the practices and processes, enforce documentation requirements, better handling of risks, etc. etc. Since organization was doing all this but with individual flavor and preferences, it was more about bringing the discipline in to the practice and make it part of the corporate culture. So there was a need for the organization to have dedicated group who can make sure that uniformity is enforced and maintained and hence there was need to carve out PMO group and introduce PM practices, enforce processes and practices uniformly across all projects and operations. Soon benefits of having PMO were realized, as with every passing month we came close to achieving the certification and we achieved the target in eight months.

This is one business case, I am sure every one will be having something to share like this. Can those be shared on this platform? This is not a search for a solution but hearing about other business cases and how were those dealt with to achieve the strategic goals.