What would be your perfect PMO?

As a PM I would like the PMO to be an active supporter, advisor and coach as Mark has put it. But what would the PMO need to do to be so active? Would they have enough human as well as other resources to be actively communicating with all the 'formal' and 'informal' project managers in the organization on a day-to-day basis? Wouldn't it be simpler if they had access to project planning and performance data? However, sharing of project data outside of the project is always tricky business without the element of trust being there. Without the trust, the PMO would be considered 'Project Police'. The best way for a PMO to build trust is to get buy-in from the project managers and inspire a sense of ownership in them.

One of the things that I would do is to catch people doing things right, “Look Brad, what you’ve done in this project is just great. Let’s get together and look at how we can help others do the same thing in their projects?” The PMO can look for small best practices from different projects and give most if not all project managers a sense of ownership in the PMO. This will also help in leveraging the existing practices instead of imposing new ones from outside. I believe that from this foundation of trust and ownership, the PMO can build up their role of active supporter, advisor, and coach.

However, this is one side of the story. The PMO also needs to justify its existence to the senior management. What advantages are we getting out of the PMO’s function? Why establish a PMO in the first place? Aren’t our current project managers competent enough to take care of their projects? Why isn’t a central repository for policies, processes, templates, and guidelines enough to support the projects? The answers to most of these questions seem obvious and shouldn’t be a problem e.g., a central repository is normally forgotten overtime if no one is actively advocating and monitoring its use and updating the repository contents by way of improvement.

Though the answers to the above questions seem obvious, senior managers are mostly interested in business objective terms. The PMO must add value to the status reporting from the projects by aligning it to the business objectives of the organization. If the PMO exists in an intermediary role, where it receives the status information from the PM and then uses it to generate its own reports, it has the potential for kicking in the ‘project police’ syndrome. The PMs may feel that the information they submit is being modified and misrepresented. I believe that the PMO should coach and mentor the PMs in aligning their status reports with the business objectives of the organization and they must present this value addition to the senior management effectively.

This is my two cents.