Project, Programme and Portfolio Support Offices (PMOs) are a way to help improve the success rate of change initiatives
Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez is one of the most influential thinkers in the fields of strategy, programme and project management. He predicts the arrival of the project economy as being possibly the most significant disruption that businesses will face. Even greater than the impact of technology, artificial intelligence or big data, as without projects organisations are unlikely to be able to effectively react to the changing business environment. As with all predictions, the reality is unlikely to be absolute but it is clear that projects and programmes will become more important as organisations need to adapt more rapidly.
Unfortunately, successful projects are elusive. There is a library of reports that show only 30% - 50% of projects succeed. Consequently, over 50% of your investment in projects does not deliver the expected benefits to your business. I think it’s fair to say there is no other part of your organisation that would get away with such a poor return on investment.
Many organisations see a Corporate Level Project, Programme and Portfolio Support Office (PMO) as one way to help improve their success rate. They have a variety of names, Programme Office, Project Support Office, Enterprise Office etc. The enlightened organisation establishes a PMO to ensure the company is working on the right things by prioritising work based on corporate strategy. This enables transparency of important data including capacity planning and availability of people with key skills. By ensuring the right projects are implemented within budget and, most importantly, without over-burdening employees leads to better outturns.
A PMO enables the organisation to deliver more rapidly and more effectively by implementing repeatable project delivery processes. With the right people they can provide consistent project management guidance, methods, tools and metrics to help deliver better outcomes throughout the organisation. Probably the most important corporate benefits are to challenge ill-conceived projects and ensure alignment to corporate strategy. Like any other corporate function, the PMO needs support from the senior leadership team and appropriate investment in people and tools to enable it to work effectively.
According to research by the House of PMO, the 3 biggest corporate benefits of a PMO are:-
- Improvements in forecasting and the management of project-based revenue
- Identification of capacity planning to ensure projects are only initiated when there are resources available
- Improved visibility of all projects throughout the organisation thereby reducing the number of overlapping corporate initiatives.
PMOs have different levels of maturity.
The House of PMO believes there are three key elements that contribute to maturity:-
- Organisational maturity,
- PMO maturity, and
- the individuals who work in PMOs professional maturity.
You need to improve all three components to build PMO capability. The more mature and therefore effective your PMO, the more your leadership team can focus on oversight and execution of the strategy without needing to get into the delivery detail of individual initiatives.
The success of your portfolios, programmes and projects is intertwined with the capability and success of your PMO. There is a wealth of guidance available on the House of PMO website. If Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez is right, then a mature PMO could be the differentiator between a successful and unsuccessful corporate strategy. Is it worth taking the risk by not investing in a PMO?
House of PMO Essentials Training and Certification
In conjunction with APMG, the professional body House of PMO, is launching four training courses targeting the various stages in a PMO practitioner’s career:
- Essentials for PMO Administrators - which has launched
- Essentials for PMO Analysts – launching in September 2021
- Essentials for PMO Managers – launching in 2022
- Essentials for PMO Directors – launching in 2022.
Rather than focusing on how to design a PMO, these training courses and the certification will provide PMO practitioners with all the essential skills and knowledge needed to succeed in their roles. Enabling the organisations, they work in to successfully centralize and support projects and programmes.
