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Project Management
Office - PMO
PMO

Lecture # 07
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Reasons to Consider Establishing a PMO

• Limited resources (financial, human staff, …)

• Multiple projects
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• Time to market is a critical factor

• Projects are not effectively prioritized
• Projects happen without authorization
• No definitive list of project’s tasks
* Condition is full executive support
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Reasons to Consider Establishing a PMO

• Inability to ensure project investments align with strategic objectives

PMO

• Lack of established standards and repeatable processes across the

organization
• Share data across to gain a full view of project, resource, and financial
information
• Extending and customizing a solution to fit growing business needs
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Reasons to Consider Establishing a PMO

• Project benefits are not managed or realized
• No visibility of progress
PMO

• Limited understanding of resource capacity

• Lack of control of project schedule
• Project risks are not captured and mitigated
• Inconsistent approaches
• Minimal control of project documentation
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Reasons to Consider Establishing a PMO

• Capturing project requests and ensuring each request meets basic PMO requirements.
• Keeping an up-to-date repository of projects underway and requests pending review.
• Managing a resource forecast to help understand resource availability for projects.
PMO

• Achieving in cost reduction through efficient, centralized services

• Contributing to project quality assurance.
• Improving IT and business efficiency in delivering projects consistently within time and
budget.
• Defining a set of project management standards, guidelines, and methods that can be
used consistently throughout the organization by project and program managers.
• Managing the shared portfolio, program and project management methodology and
processes across the organization.
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Reasons to Consider Establishing a PMO

• Ensuring the defined project management standards and procedures are followed.
• Managing and facilitating the portfolio management process.
• Implementing a scoring and prioritization model to assess which project requests should be approved.
• Facilitating project portfolio management with a selection of projects to make sure the organization
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works on the right things at the right time.

• Providing a centralized and consistent governance reporting model.
• Ensuring that stakeholders have up-to-date, accurate information with a frequency and format they
understand.
• Providing big picture master project view to understand dependencies and risks.
• Providing audit trails for large projects to ensure compliance with regulatory compliance.
• Offering advice and support to project stakeholders.
• Becoming a source of training, guidance, and mentoring for project managers.
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Reasons to Consider Establishing a PMO

• Providing on-going services to make sure that problems stay solved.
• Become the guardian of the project knowledge base.
• Implement a program and project gating review process to make sure
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on-going compliance with business cases.

• Centralized archive of lessons learned.
• Provide consultancy on-demand to project stakeholders, sponsors,
business owners, and IT owners
• Implement a continuous improvement program for portfolio,
program, project and resource management.
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Challenges Faced by a PMO

(1) Rigid corporate culture and failure to manage organizational resistance to change,
(2) lack of experienced project managers (PMs) and PMO leadership, and
(3) lack of appropriate change management strategy.
(4) Failure to design a PMO around a company's specific needs
PMO

(5) Lack of stakeholder commitment to common methodology and tools for the PMO
(6) Poor definition and communication of PMO goals and purpose
(7) Lack of full support of the senior management and various stakeholders to the PMO
(8) Role, authority, and responsibility of the PMO is poorly defined or understood
(9) Lack of defined scope and size of PMO implementation
(10)Failure to align PMO implementation strategy to organizational strategy
(11)Difficulty in evaluating the effectiveness of PMO in the organization
(12)Lack of training and communication on PMO implementation to all stakeholders
(13)Lack of training and communication on PMO implementation to all stakeholders
(14)Difficulty in staffing PMO with most experienced personnel
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Why PMOs Fail?

• Insufficient authority or organizational buy-in
• Incorrect model
• Misplaced priorities
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• Perceived as a “project police” function

• Provides limited value that is mainly tailored toward inexperienced project managers
• Turns into self-serving organizations rather than supporting functions
• Lacks a clear line of where the PMOs end and the projects begin
• Unclear focus areas or scope
• Failure to streamline processes and capture benefits across the organization
• Failing to manage stakeholder expectations.
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Stakeholder Expectations
PMO
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Why PMOs Fail?

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