YBT Services Pty Ltd

The Five Facets of a Good PMO

From a holistic standpoint, a good PMO should ensure that it tackles what some call the ‘five attributes’ of a good PMO. The graphic at the top of this post denotes those key attributes and each will now be defined in detail.
Standards – One of the key notions of a PMO is to ensure that specific projects and their inherent methodologies are performed in a consistent fashion. From this standpoint, the PMO should act as the vanguard of all standards and policies in use within the organization. This can include uniform tool utilization, common templates, best practices guides, and so forth. The key takeaway is that a PMO should strive towards commonality; the more often that standards deviate from project to project, the harder it is to maintain those projects (or aggregate programs) in a consistent and efficient way.

Policies – This would normally fall into the realm of ‘governance’. Ideally, the PMO should monitor how projects are being executed within the enterprise and determine if any are deviating from the more common methodologies that are in use. Note that one of the common fallacies of PMOs is too become too aggressive in its monitoring aspects, effectively turning the PMO into little more than an internal police department. Certain policies should be adhered to but it is also important to add some level of flexibility to any situation to give the project managers a little leeway. Policies are meant to be rules and the last thing that a PMO wants to see happen is the Wild West within the corporation. At the same time, they also want to avoid a George Orwell Dystopia. The point of policies is to act as a guideline to give individuals frames of reference with regards to certain principles in the corporation. Some will be absolute but others can be flexible. Additionally, policies should be a living concept within the PMO. If a policy becomes stale or does not scale in a new project situation, adjustments should be made accordingly.

Training – As with any entity in a corporation, a learning curve will exist for those becoming familiar with the various concepts being employed, the tools being used, the people involved, etc. As such, a PMO should have a training component that affords project managers, stakeholders and team members to have a singular point of contact or online reference that they can visit to get answers to various questions and use documents and videos made available as guides. As much as possible, the training component should have plenty of ‘self-service’ aspects associated with it to ensure quick turnaround for individuals. Specific hands on training can also be incorporated as needed in the form on online lecture series or in classroom study. Training can often be broken down into three target areas: Passive (self service), Active (online lectures and videos) and Interactive (virtual or physical classroom). A good PMO should use some combination of these options to produce a cohesive training set.