Does Your PMO Have A Clear Purpose?
Ben Eckwahl, PMP, PMI-ACP
Managing Partner at Phase Zero Partners | Project Manager | PMO Builder | Specialist in bringing simplicity to complex projects |
This is the second article in our series on solving common PMO issues.
In our experience, and in our survey results, one of the issues we see consistently is a lack of clearly understood PMO purpose. This may seem like an odd thing to say. PMOs exist to run projects, right? It’s likely that is true in every case but it’s also not the sum of your worth or your value in most instances. In the same way your organization has a mission statement, understanding yours, and making sure your team does as well helps you deliver support consistently and stay on mission, whatever your mission might be.
If you think you have a clear mission:
One of the activities we like is a simple test to help determine if this problem exists and exactly how impactful it is. Ask these two questions of your team and the leaders you work with:
This should take someone five minutes to respond and the responses will be telling. There are a few key takeaways from our analysis of the answers:
Let’s tackle these in order.
Consistency of responses - This will show how good your PMO is at consistently advertising the vision. If you get different responses from your project management team members, start there and work outward. If your project team is in sync but your business leaders are not look at how you communicate the benefits you bring and the process you follow.
The “What are we not doing” question - The purpose of this question, for this activity, is to see if there are things your PMO does that your leadership team doesn't realize you do. If you get an answer like “I wish our PMO more actively managed project budgets” and that is something within your mandate you have an opportunity for a quick win by just communicating that directly and correcting the misunderstanding. The rest of the feedback is beneficial for future planning, just not critical to this exercise.
In a case like this, with an established PMO we recommend creating a light benefit statement to ensure your internal team is aligned with what you do. This will give you the base to start advertising your capabilities to your organization and ensuring they know exactly what capabilities and benefits you bring.
What if we have no clear mission?
Great, you have arrived - Whether you are finally given the opportunity to start a shiny new PMO or taking one over, you have made it. It’s green fields and blue skies; you can finally do all the things you never had a chance to do simply working as a project manager in someone else’s PMO.
What do you want to do first? Everything. You need project charters, requirements reviews, stage gates, communication plans, risk logs, meeting notes, use cases, business cases, user stories, an Agile method, project plans, work breakdown structures, prioritization reviews with Sr. Management, and on, and on, and on. You can see all the problems and you have the knowledge and experience to fix them all. You just need to decide where to start.
It can be tempting to start with whatever you know. Maybe it’s a great project plan template you developed over the years or a requirement matrix you love. Quick wins are nice, but they are almost counterproductive to the goal of having a clear purpose; you end up with a lot of random processes/artifacts and no clear visionary glue to bind them together.
To get to a clear vision we like to start with a bit of discovery before putting any process in play. Why is there now a project manager or PMO where there wasn’t before? What are the problems we have to solve? What order do we want to tackle them in? How many of these problems can we take on immediately?
You may decide your PMO is going to be tactically focused at the beginning, taking on the most complex projects and managing them with a basic methodology. You may go the route of starting as a strategic partner, helping your organization determine how many projects they can tackle. It may be some hybrid of the two. Whatever way you start, clearly define what your offering is at that time and clearly communicate that. There is no shame in saying “There are the twenty things your PMO will be able to do for you eventually, here are the five we can do today.”
Why do we care about this?
We see a couple things happen, when a PMO has no clear purpose.
The first thing is that the PMO becomes a catch-all for random things that don’t clearly live within another operational or technical department or what they cannot handle from a resourcing perspective. “We are super busy, can the PMO take this on?” becomes a common refrain. This can drive dissatisfaction from your team members when they feel like they are just admins or proxies, filling whatever gap shows up that day. It is also difficult to manage your team’s workload, since your team ends up being the default owners for whatever slipped through the cracks that day/week/month.
The second thing we see is that your value inside of your organization can suffer. If you don’t have a clear purpose it’s hard to measure your success or ensure you are doing high-value work. If you are not doing high-value work your PMO can be perceived as not having a lot of overall organizational impact. It is significantly easier to evaluate and accept/decline requests that come into your PMO if your organization understands exactly what your PMO does and does not do.
A clear, well communicated, organization purpose simply sets the stage, the next few articles will cover some of the tactical aspects of simplifying the PMO approach to consistently deliver high quality results.