PMO: Evolve or Die

Many Project Management Offices (PMOs) urgently need a process of evolution that lets them prove their value to the business in an increasingly competitive and dynamic context. Building a work and management environment under an agile mindset, and adopting new practices at both the team and strategic levels, is imperative.

Purpose

PMOs are organizational structures that, whether centralized or not, contribute to delivering benefits (business value) through projects. Beyond good practices and “due process,” these structures need to work at strengthening strategy realization — a fancy way of saying that the things we dream up for our organizations actually happen. At the same time, PMOs need to enable early, timely, and constant validation of those benefits through risk management and by verifying assumptions and other contextual factors. Something like moving from talk to action, and validating results early.

Why Do PMOs Fail?

Many PMOs, and many friends who run PMOs, poured their efforts into what I coined a few years back as the “processification” of projects. In their rush to standardize project execution, they raced to implement tools, templates, protocols, and procedures for every single thing they could think of. At the worst possible moment, many of them discovered the PMBOK and interpreted a compendium of good practices as a “strict methodology.”

Setting aside whether standard processes actually help projects or not, let’s remember that projects were being executed and completed somehow before PMOs existed. For better or worse, it’s undeniable that projects existed long before PMOs, and that many of them delivered excellent results.

So, PMOs whose entire value proposition centered on standardizing project execution either don’t exist anymore, or are staring down extinction.

How many versions of “the methodology” can we produce before realizing we’ve stopped adding value? Weren’t projects being executed before PMOs existed? What were organizations doing with their strategy before? Did project managers not exist? Did every project fail?

The real value of a PMO should aim at validating the portfolio and its projects through a simple mantra: do the right things right.

The Root of the Problem

In my humble opinion, there’s an unnecessary “Operations” vs. “Projects” dichotomy, built on an extravagant assumption of endless resources — one that assumes it’s possible to organize resources and recruit dedicated teams for every project, meaning 100% dedicated, because otherwise they wouldn’t really be “dedicated,” would they? This dichotomy has created unhealthy competition between projects and operations over the most valuable asset any company has: people, their knowledge, and their time.

Many PMOs have promoted this two-sided view of organizations — with a certain tacit blessing from institutions like the Project Management Institute. Under this view, they’ve tried to optimize “their part,” fragmenting the company and fueling the construction of the famous silos. PMOs focused on standardization only made things worse, creating a partial view of reality based on “the state of the projects,” without clearly acknowledging the state of operations and its impact on strategy realization.

As always, this isn’t a black-and-white diagnosis — the reality is that, in most companies, PMOs don’t have people dedicated to executing projects. As a result, and inevitably, operations end up governing the availability and performance of projects.

PMOs aren’t meant to manage operations, or step into them, but they should provide full visibility into what’s happening during strategy realization and portfolio execution — giving senior leadership and teams the information they need to better organize their work, whether that’s projects or operations.

Simple Steps

It’s always better to have a healthy but heterogeneous and methodologically diverse project portfolio than a portfolio of homogeneous, perfectly standardized projects in crisis.

There are several methodologies and approaches to redesigning a PMO. Whichever path you choose, my recommendation would be to work across three clear fronts — closely aligned with IPMA’s project excellence model and PMI’s newer approach to the PMP certification process.

People

• Develop leaders’ competencies and skills through training programs — which today can be online, remote, and asynchronous.
• Offer leaders support and coaching. Help leaders grow into coaches for their own teams.
• Establish metrics and help leaders measure performance. Work with them to identify results and strengthen the continuous improvement process.

Processes and Tools

• Assess and adjust processes based on what projects actually need — favor and strengthen tailoring over 100% process compliance.
• Apply the MVP concept — minimum viable product — to the methodology itself. Promote simplifying processes and tools, and support project leaders who need it with a rich base of knowledge, experience, and “methodology add-ons.”
• Support cultural transformation and organization-wide agility — note that I’m placing this point under “processes and tools.” Treat culture and behaviors as an asset.

Business Results

• Go back to defining clear, practical indicators for strategy realization.
• Bring project progress and operational performance together, side by side, to clearly identify how operations positively or negatively affect projects.
• Share this information openly, clearly, and transparently across every area.

This simple model has been applied successfully in PMO maturity and strengthening initiatives across a range of organizations, in services, finance, and manufacturing.

It’s proven that the PMO is a valuable ally in understanding strategy and the company’s progress toward its goals. PMOs need to evolve.