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5 Common Reasons Why Pmo Fail
5 Common Reasons Why Pmo Fail
Author: PM Majik
1. No perceived value
2. No senior sponsorship
3. Lack of authority
4. Staffed by inexperienced resources
5. Seen as audit function – “project police”
• This means the PMO function is not respected and any attempts to request
project information or implement standards are either ignored or the inputs
from the projects is very poor and do not follow standards.
• The unfortunate impact is that the quality of the reporting provided by the
PMO is very poor. This reinforces the project manager’s and senior
manager’s argument that the PMO offers no or little value.
• A PMO should have a senior sponsor (if not you have real
problem). However, even if you have a sponsor, in many cases they do not
understand the full benefits of a PMO and think that it is simply a means to
achieve a consolidated report (a simple case of collecting all the inputs from
the projects and placing them into a consolidated presentation).
• This will result in a sponsor that sees little value in supporting the PMO to
execute their duties. This is especially critical when you have the situation
where the project managers complain to their own sponsors that the PMO is
taking up their valuable time to complete pointless reports instead of
important delivery work. Then, at the next senior management meeting, the
sponsors will find a way to attribute any delays on their projects to the fact
that the PMO is impacting the projects with pointless requests.
• A disengaged or reluctant PMO sponsor will not support the actions of the
PMO. This will result in the position of the PMO being further weakened or
even to be disbanded!
• If senior management believe that all the PMO does is collect and
consolidate information, this will result in the PMO being staffed by junior or
inexperienced resources - why do you need experienced (expensive)
resources to collect, copy and paste information into a spreadsheet or
PowerPoint?
• This manifests in a PMO that does not know what tools and process should
be implemented, are unable to review and challenge inputs resulting in poor
quality output that is not valued by senior management. This compounds
the problem further, why would you invest more funds for more experienced
resources if the value provided is so low?
• The result is that the working relationship between the PMO and project
managers breaks down resulting in only the minimum information being
reported and the PMO not really understanding where the REAL problems
are in the project.
• Remember the PMO is not an audit function, it should be working with and
supporting the projects to help them deliver. The objective of the project
managers and the PMO is the same - the successful delivery of the projects.
Taking steps to avoid these 5 common reasons for PMO failure will greatly improve the
performance of your PMO.
1. No perceived value
2. No senior sponsorship
3. Lack of authority
4. Staffed by inexperienced resources
5. Seen as audit function – “project police”
If you really want to add a lot of value, consider investing in a set of professional PMO
Templates. This will allow the rapid implementation of tools and processes.
Additional Resource
http://www.pmmajik.com/5-reasons-pmos-fail/
If you want more information, visit www.pmmajik.com where you will find lots of project
and PMO resources including the FREE guide, 7 Steps to Set-Up a PMO.
Visit http://www.pmmajik.com/set-pmo/
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