Never underestimate the importance of PMO – or how to improve project execution through your Project Management Office
For my article on Project Management Office, please let me indulge you with a little anecdote from my early project management days. Because I think it’s a common – and painful – mistake for project managers to underestimate the importance of PMO.
But first, let’s take a quick look on what project management office (PMO) is. PMO is short for a project team that defines and maintains standards for project management. The PMO creates and maintains project documentations and best practices, tracks metrics, and offers training. PMO reports on project progress to executives and stakeholders, helps prioritize projects, and ensures all projects support the overall business objectives of the project and program.
As a young project manager, I had to learn how to set staffing priorities. In one of my first large international projects, I staffed with full focus and high priority on lead roles such as design, implementation and test lead and no importance whatsoever for PMO. As you can imagine, this worked like a charm: The project began full force, all was sort of okay, but when it came to report the progress to senior management… I was in deep shit, pardon my language. As PMO was not correctly staffed, I could neither show nor sell the progress my team made.
Today I prioritize in reverse: the PMO lead role and the staffing of PMO is of utmost importance to me. They need to cover me as a Project Manager and the earlier this team is up and running, the better.
Let me share the challenges most project managers experience when it comes to the Project Management Office in large scale, international IT projects:
- Senior Management and project sponsors don’t believe, that a PMO is required and don’t want to invest in it. The project should follow a self-service approach, meaning each project leadership team needs to do all reporting him/herself.
- The Project Management Office is staffed with unexperienced people who execute given tasks but don’t understand the overall scope of a PMO. They can’t manage the PMO processes or provide guidelines and standards to the project team.
- The Lead PMO is a very crucial role, but usually not staffed with a senior and experienced person.
- Clients introduce an ePMO or an off-shore PMO service to centralize and standardize PMO activities for their overall project portfolio. For selective PMO processes, this can be a very good solution, but to believe all PMO processes across all projects of their project portfolio can be standardized, is an illusion.
- Very often, clients and project leadership teams underestimate the scope of a PMO and limit the PMO services to reporting, financial management, maybe risk management and administrative tasks such as booking rooms and setting up meetings. As a result, projects are suffering. Because there is no control on deliverables and document management, there are no sign-off processes, no quality assurance, the project communication is not structured and there is no standardization. It is very unlikely that projects with such a setup can deliver in time and in budget.
What can a project manager do to handle these challenges?
- The project manager should have a very good understand of his/her requirements for a project management office. The PMO must cover a wide scope to ensure an efficient execution of the project. This includes scope and deliverables, plan and workforce management, finance and vendor management, governance and reporting, risk, issue and dependency management, quality & assurance management as well as project communication and administration. This work usually requires a small team.
- The PMO lead is the most important role for a project manager, as they must work closely together. Therefore, the PMO lead role must be wisely staffed. Each project manager should have clear preferences regarding the PMO lead and suggest a PMO lead he/she knows and trusts.
- Sponsors and senior management must be convinced that it is wise to invest in a proper PMO. I always use the picture of a pilot: The Project Manager is the pilot, the PMO is the function who provides the instruments the pilot needs to fly the plane. The better these instruments work, the safer the flight.
In short: Never underestimate the importance of PMO.
