If you were to ask 10 different managers, “What do you want from your project management organization (PMO)?” you’d likely get 10 very different answers. Managers may want their PMO to have the horsepower of a Ferrari sports car, but realistically might be better suited with the average sedan. The Ferrari’s ability to go 0-60 in 3 seconds quickly becomes irrelevant if the buyer’s needs include taking the kids to soccer practice and hauling groceries – just as an advanced PMO structure is an ill fit for a start-up company.
So what are your project management needs and where do you start? This guide will take you through 5 steps that will help you tailor your PMO to meet your organizational needs, without draining your resources.
Step 1: Understand Your Objectives
Planning a successful PMO is not unlike planning any other project; you must first understand what the PMO is trying to fix.
Step 2: Realize Your Pain Points
Ask yourself, “What are my greatest pain points?” Begin to evaluate and identify the underlying problems or issues that your projects consistently experience. Are your projects succeeding? For example, are they meeting their project goals and objectives (technical, cost, or schedule)? If the projects are successful, do you struggle to know whether you have the right mix of projects to meet your corporate objectives and support your strategic goals?
Monitoring project and portfolio performance can be challenging, especially if the projects are not centrally controlled. Pain points resulting from poor project and portfolio execution can stem from a number of sources: poor or inconsistent project management application, overloaded resources (too many projects, insufficient capacity), constantly changing portfolio priorities, or simply poor project selection. The right PMO should be structured to identify and resolve these immediate pain issues.
Step 3: Assess Your Assets
Now that you understand what hurts, the next step is to determine the right treatment. A great starting point is an assessment of your current organizational assets – what do you have vs. what do you need?
A key element of your organizational assessment is to understand what can be reasonably accomplished. Think about the two-seater Ferrari. It would be foolish to try to transform it into a family sedan. An honest assessment of organizational strengths and weaknesses must include setting reasonable and achievable goals. Understanding what you have to work with, and more importantly where you want to go, will make building the PMO you want much easier and more straightforward.
A common way to answer these questions is to assess the maturity of your PM community. Several methods exist to help you gauge your capabilities compared to PM best practices. Most of these assessments concentrate on three basic themes:
Step 4: Identify Your PMO Model
PMO success comes in all shapes and sizes, from the simple management of a few resource assignments or projects to full-fledged project portfolio integration, planning, and control. The most advanced PMOs integrate Resource Management across multiple functional and geographical areas to truly deliver robust, consistent project results. Based on how your organization is structured and what is ultimately deemed feasible will determine how the PMO takes shape.
Determine which of the three typical PMO models fit your organization best and choose the model that most closely aligns with goals, resources, and management:
Step 5: Launch Your PMO Small & Steady
Many PMO implementation efforts tend to load up on process and infrastructure right from the start, burdening the PMs with cumbersome and overly bureaucratic processes and systems. In many cases this approach fails to achieve the desired organizational impacts.
An alternate approach is to start small with minor changes and quick wins and then grow from success.
Think about good football teams. They don’t implement a playbook at the start of spring practice. Instead, they focus on the fundamentals, blocking and tackling, and sprinkle in some basic plays. They build on that foundation over time and by the start of the season they have installed and reinforced a complete and robust playbook. Even if the team has experienced players, a wise coach knows to start building at the level of his lowest rookie. A business organization and a football team are similar in that they are only as good as their weakest members.
Effective PMO implementation focuses on key fundamentals and immediate needs and then builds on them as it moves forward.
Designing and implementing the right PMO for your organization is no small undertaking. It requires a disciplined approach that balances people, processes, and tools, not to mention time. The reality is that it might take a few years to achieve your desired maturity level, so don’t get ahead of yourself. Exercise patience. It will all be worth it as you begin to actualize your competitive advantage.
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