Project Management Offices have been around for a long time. They are globally recognized and celebrated. Yet, there is a lack of global alignment on what a PMO is:
- What does it do?
- Is there only one definition?
- What does it look like?
- How does it operate?
- Who should be part of the team?
- What capabilities make a PMO successful?
Lots of organizations use the three little letters P-M-O, but what those letters represent can be very different:
- A Project Management Center of Excellence (i.e., authors of the PM processes)
- A Governance Office (i.e., overseers of compliance)
- A project manager resource pool
- A portfolio management facilitator
- A resource management center, charged with balancing individual contributor or team supply and demand
Regardless of the type of PMO, you have these five steps will help you advance your team and add value to your organization.
1. Understand Your Current PMO
Have you had your PMO assessed? I’m not referring to a customer satisfaction survey from your stakeholders. I mean an assessment that addresses what you are doing, what you could be doing, and how to move forward, based on a standard set of criteria. Doing an assessment like this, however, can be a challenge to self-administer.
Do you have a set of objective criteria? Do you have a standardized approach to follow (is it tried and proven)? Are you an unbiased party to the assessment?
Assessing the maturity of your practices is not about a number. Sometimes organizations get stuck there. The Capability Maturity Model Integration framework (CMMI) has a five-level rating system. Organizations that focus on simply attaining a “Level 3” grade are missing the point. It is more important to understand your why. As Simon Sinek has famously pointed out, “A why is like a compass direction. It tells you where you are going.” What value does your PMO provide? What motivates your team? These answers will be more important than a numerical grade on a five-point scale. It is valuable to understand where you are with respect to your value.
2. Follow a PMO Roadmap
Without a map that directs your growth journey, how can you assess if you are making progress? Your PMO roadmap should have both short-term and long-term goals, deliverables, and measures of value. A roadmap lays out the desired functional state of your PMO. It outlines the steps necessary to reach the future state. Similarly, the roadmap can address the span of control of the PMO. The PMO focus may be on IT only, one operating department, or the entire organization. Your roadmap will change based on where you provide coverage currently versus where you want to go.
3. Build with Experience
Don’t try to reinvent the wheel and borrow liberally from others (other leaders, other departments, other organizations). Tailor as necessary to make processes and methods fit your culture, your industry, your team size, and your capabilities. Don’t try to have your project managers architect your PMO. It is not that they are not able; it is about capability and experience. Do you want to risk creating a new team with someone who has never created a PMO before? PMs are great at delivery. However, that does not mean they are necessarily organizational architects.
4. Define, Capture, and Showcase Value
To borrow from a famous scene in the 1996 film Jerry Maguire, for your PMO to be successful, you have to be able to show them the money. The “money” has to be the value your stakeholders want from the PMO. Be careful: if you are the PMO leader, don’t specifically focus on building the PMO you want to run. Your stakeholders’ perceptions are your reality. Define a way to measure value and report back early and often on how well you are doing against your metrics.
5. Strive for Continuous Improvement
Follow your roadmap, but don’t let the journey end. Think about continuous improvement and get a little bit better every day. Project management offices can get stuck in a rut. They deliver on a set of functions and they eventually stop evolving. Chances are that your organization is continuously changing, so be sure you are adapting to it. Change does not always have to be a Big Hairy Audacious Goal; little changes make a difference too. Think about change as simple, incremental, and always delivering value.
