Project Management Offices (PMOs) can serve varied purposes based on your needs and desired benefits. The important thing is that the PMO is established and continually evaluated to ensure it is meeting organizational needs. This is most effectively accomplished with the assistance of a professional with the experience and ability to integrate into your business, elicit the desired outcomes, and implement the right mix of functions to meet those expectations.
It's common that as companies grow and mature, projects are "hurry up and go" without time to establish clear expectations and standard processes to meet those expectations. Team members might struggle when switching between projects led by PMs when each runs things differently. Inconsistencies in status reporting can lead to leadership challenges when evaluating strategy and execution.
Even when companies make the realization that they need to establish a PMO, they might not have the expertise in-house or they can't afford to pull those experienced people off active projects for the initiative.
We start by understanding the expectations regarding the benefits the PMO should provide across stakeholders and then align PMO functions to meet those expectations. We accomplish this through surveys and/or stakeholder interviews. Alignment is crucial to enabling a PMO to deliver value. We place a premium on setting consistency in a baseline across project deliverables while allowing enough flexibility for PMs to best service their specific project teams and stakeholders. This could look like specific required information captured in status reports, timing of the status reports themselves, or guardrails around regular client communication.
Change is hard and sometimes met with resistance. Communication, involvement in the process, and a steady/incremental approach to implementing a PMO leads to accelerated adoption and benefits realization.
PMOs should grow and change with your business. Expectations evolve for many reasons and the PMO needs to adapt to those changes. If your projects are experiencing the same issues and failures repeatedly, or you just feel your PMO is stale and no longer relevant, it's time to evaluate and adjust.
The PMO Global Alliance (now part of the Project Management Institute) recommends evaluating PMOs at any point where expectations change or, at a minimum, on an annual basis. Reviewing stakeholder expectations to ensure PMO functions still align is paramount to the PMO success in supporting the organization.
Project managers aren't always the best candidates for managing a PMO or need additional coaching/mentorship to grow into that role. A fractional leader to manage a PMO is an effective strategy for many reasons:
Quickly add experience and knowledge to your team
Avoid the overhead of a full-time hire (no insurance premiums, 401k matches/fees, bonus payouts, PTO costs, etc.)
PMO Management doesn't always require 40 hours per week...this is a flexible and scalable option to control costs based on the needs of the organization
Fractional leaders are integrated with the team and enabled to make decisions and do the work...this fundamentally differs from a consultant making recommendations and not driving implementation
Fractional leaders can coach and mentor existing team members to grow into the role for you to promote from within; or help with hiring a full time hire, if that's eventually the right decision for the business
Fractional leaders typically have varied experiences and have developed a range of skills; this can lead to minimal onboarding time
Fractional leaders can provide fresh views and unbiased thoughts to your organization
Program/Portfolio Management - We can manage a group of related projects as part of a program or a strategic portfolio of projects.
People Allocation - Manage assignments across all projects and work with project managers to make sure they have the support they need to be successful. Review potential technology solutions to help streamline the process.
Retrospective/Lessons Learned - Taking the time to document and share what was learned over the course of a project is often overlooked or pushed off as teams move on to the next. Sometimes the process is half-heartedly executed and the knowledge is ultimately lost or not applied to future projects at all. Or perhaps there isn't a solid candidate not directly related to the project who can facilitate a retrospective effectively. Bringing a neutral 3rd party with experience in to lead retros in a positive and constructive manner at the end of iterations or during project closure can bring tremendous value to an organization.
Project Management Tool Implementation - There are plenty of tools in the market to help manage projects. Choosing and implementing a tool from scratch or migrating from a previous tool that no longer meets your needs can take be a project on its own. We have experience with a variety of tools and can help navigate establishing workflows and standards to meet your team's needs.
Steering Committee/Escalation Point - We've seen plenty of projects go sideways because leadership was not available to consistently attend Steer Co meetings. These meetings are invaluable to creating healthy relationships with client team leaders. It's an inevitable reality that something over the course of a project will not go as planned; when there's bad news to deliver, it's not a good situation when that's the only time leadership talks. A PMO leader can be an escalation point on projects to assist PMs when projects have issues.