REPOSITIONING THE PMO

PMOs are suffering an identity crisis. Typically responsible for project and program delivery management and centralized within the organization, PMOs are well-placed to be the conduit for executing an organization’s portfolio of projects and strategic initiatives. However, exploratory research conducted by PMI at the 2012 PMO Symposium and with PMI’s Global Executive Council1 revealed that PMOs are struggling with defining their role within organizations and demonstrating their value, despite evidence suggesting that PMOs offer a suite of benefits to organizations that champion them. In Transforming the Program Management Office into a Results Management Office, Deloitte notes that “despite the perceived need for PMOs, their ambiguous role and often incomplete implementation limit their effectiveness. Traditional PMOs have become paper tigers, ineffective at managing programs to achieve results.”2 Furthermore, project management practitioners talk confidently to each other about what the PMO does, but the truth of the matter is that no two are alike. There is an abundance of literature and research on the topic of PMOs, which demonstrates that various types of PMO structures exist and that these structures act in different ways, perform different tasks and implement organizational strategy in varying ways. However, there is no agreed on nomenclature that identifies, defines or separates these different PMOs. There is no formalized model and no standard consensus on the “right ” form of a PMO. There is also little consensus even on fundamental notions, such as what the letters “PMO ” actually stand for. However, the importance of successfully managing projects and programs primarily through the PMO is made clear in PMI’s 2013 Pulse of the Profession™, which uncovered that organizations undervaluing project management generally spend less time, money and effort on critical functions such as talent management. The result was a clear drop in rate