Does your organization have a Project Management Office (PMO)? Do you work within that PMO? What exactly does the PMO do? What is the purpose of the PMO? What kind of power does the PMO have within your organization? These are all very good questions.
There are certainly organizations that have groups named “PMO” but are they really? The basic formation is a group of people that each manage projects in an ad-hoc way but might report to the same Manager. There are no common documentation templates, no way to effectively understand how successful each project is or whether the status of the project is having an effect on any other project in the portfolio.
There are PMOs that have standardized project templates (thank you PMI) but each project manager keeps the data on their own computer thus enabling other projects to suffer the same fate as their own. Repeatable mistakes are made and project success rates fall if anyone is monitoring them at all. A possible solution is an interactive intranet site for the PMO to collect all their data for collaboration purposes. Now we are talking….
Does your PMO have input on which projects are accepted to move forward? They should because they are well positioned to know what the resource usage really is. Each project manager should be able to report on who is engaged on their project, how many hours each resource has available in a week or overall, and how effective each resource is to the project. This should improve the ability to prioritize and reduce the risk to projects in the queue ready to move forward.
How much money did your company spend on projects last year? Is that number higher or lower than the previous year? Is there enough data to accurately gauge how quickly the business is growing or reducing its dependency on projects? Are there projects that need to be done versus those that are nice to have done? Without accurate data collected from the project portfolio how can we create our strategy for the next year or the next five years? If only there was a way to tell the performance level of our Project Management Office…..oh, wait, we’ve got something for that.
Logixsource has created a “Rate My PMO” tool, available for you to try, free on the website. This tool takes moments to complete and will give you a baseline of your PMO performance level and next steps to increase the value of the PMO throughout the company.
If your company needs help in auditing, building, improving your PMO, reach out to Scott Savage at ssavage@logixsource.com and let the magic begin.
