The Importance of the PMO for a Project Oriented Organization
Everyone could be your teacher is one of my preferred sentences. You, as a project professional need to be ready to learn from anybody else. The concept of PMO has been used to have different meanings: project management office, program management office, center of project management excellence. In any case the PMO needs to be an entity who helps project managers and their project stakeholders to manage successful projects.
What is a PMO?
A project management office (PMO) may be a group or department or in some cases only a person in a company that sets and maintains high standards for project management. There are many different types of PMOS according to the project’s stakeholder needs. They need to keep the best practices, strategy direction, follow the project status. There are statistics that nearly 7 in 10 companies globally have the PMO. Let’s say, the PMO is an integral part of the success and health of a company and its projects.
Among others, one of the key roles of PMOs is to achieve great results and benefits from all project management processes, methods, and policies. The project management office needs to embody the company’s culture and strategy to be most effective.
In fact, the popularity of the office has increased, because more and more organizations with PMOs have got returns on investment. However each PMO needs to be kept updated and alive, I mean aligned to the organization and project stakeholder’s needs. In order to do that the PMO needs to work on practical frameworks to use to maintain the business and organization health.
We may list many essential reasons for the introduction of the PMO, especially in large companies with complex projects. Any company need to have some group to keep track of all the processes, conflicts, risks and changes and who cares about project management awareness and good practices for the whole organization.
What industries are interested in PMOs?
The need for a project management office increases depending on company’s size the sphere and the industry’s demand. I found project offices in healthcare, IT, finance institutions, manufacturing, telecom, engineering, construction, consulting and professional services.
The PMO need is there for any industry if the want to be a successful project- oriented organization. If you want to know more please ask us.
PMOs and company’s size
You’ll probably agree that nowadays project management is becoming more popular than ever. In business, the need and number of PMOs have been steadily increasing across companies of all sizes. Of course, you may find the project management office faster in large enterprises. However, mid-size business and small companies can also include them.
What Does a PMO Do?
The specific application areas of a project management office may vary greatly from company to company, from industry to industry. There are no ideal task fields. Just many possibilities, such as:
- to compile the project portfolio. PMOs classify, select and prioritize projects based on the strategy and resources
- to standardize processes and choose methods for project management
- to maintain current employee info
- to plan and optimize the use of resources, solve resource conflicts
- to track project progress and control the dependencies
- to find and implement appropriate PM tools and software, available for employees; train them
- to provide reliable project data and increase transparency of projects
- to create a knowledge base (including past projects to avoid repeat errors)
- to coach project leaders
- to increase healthy communication
- to provide administrative and operational support for project managers….
If you want to learn more about PMOs join us in in Barcelona on July 1-5th, 2019.
