Is There a Future for the 'Traditional' PMO?
Andy Jordan is President of Roffensian Consulting S.A., a Roatan, Honduras-based management consulting firm with a comprehensive project management practice. Andy always appreciates feedback and discussion on the issues raised in his articles and can be reached at andy.jordan@roffensian.com. Andy’s new book Risk Management for Project Driven Organizations is now available.
I’ll be the first to admit I’ve been speaking and writing a lot in recent years about modern PMOs. The growth in importance of portfolio management has led to an increasing number of PMOs assuming more strategic responsibilities and spending more time focused “up and out” to other business areas of the organization.
However, there are still a lot of PMOs that have a predominantly “down and in” focus, supporting project managers and their teams in traditional roles—reporting, process and methodology, training and support, etc. As those traditional roles have been receiving less focus of late, I wanted to spend this article looking at them in a little more depth, exploring how they can remain relevant in today’s world of evolving PMO expectations.
There’s no single PMO model
For as long as there have been PMOs, there have been multiple different structures and approaches to the PMO function. Do a Google search for “PMO models” and you’ll find some common terms like “center of excellence,” but you’ll also find numerous different unique terms—and even significant disagreement on how many PMO models there are. The reason for this is very simple: Every organization experiences different challenges and opportunities in project execution, so they all need slightly different
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Published at Mon, 02 Apr 2018 04:00:00 +0000
