A Project Management Office, abbreviated to PMO, a group or department in an enterprise that establishes and implements best practices and maintains standards related to project management, planning and execution. The PMO strives to standardize and introduce economies of repetition in the execution of projects. The PMO also serves as an organization's central hub for project documentation, guidance and success metrics. Most PMO processes, methodologies and best practices are based on industry standards, such as A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK Guide), which was originally published by the Project Management Institute (PMI), a certification body for project managers (PM).
A PMO is the backbone of a successful project management approach at an organization. It is a function that provides decision support information, although it doesn't make any decisions itself. A PMO underpins the project delivery mechanisms by ensuring that all business change in an organization is managed in a controlled way. A PMO's main purpose is to facilitate project success by establishing best practices, mitigating risks and ensuring on-time project delivery within a specified budget. So what does that actually mean in practice? PMO teams fulfill a variety of functions on a day-to-day basis including:
Strategic PMOs enable strategic change in organizations. PMOs vary widely. Some serve as a means to standardize project-related governance processes and facilitate sharing of resources and tools. Others serve as centers of excellence, and still others align project and program work to corporate strategy across an enterprise. The PMO often play the role as a guardian of Enterprise Project Management tools and project management methods. There will normally be an expert (or several) in the PMO who can support project managers and their teams with using any project-related software. Here is the role of the stakeholders in PMO:
The project manager manages the constraints (scope, schedule, cost, quality, etc.) of the individual projects, while the PMO manages the methodologies, standards, over all risks/opportunities, metrics, and interdependence among projects at the enterprise level. They actually operate on different levels. While a project manager is accountable for achieving the goals approved for their projects they are responsible, a PMO is accountable for achieving the approved goals for the enterprise.
Typically, the PMO defines and maintains standards of project management within the organization through the standardization and the execution of repeatable and scalable processes. The PMO is also the source of documentation, guidance and metrics regarding the practice of project management and execution. Whereas the role of the PM is to adhere to the guidelines and practices standardized by the PMO during project planning, preparation, and execution.
There are many critical success factors that influence the success of a PMO. Here are some key success factors that are worthy of discussion.
For any Program Management Office, it is extremely important that you are able to show how your PMO delivers tangible and meaningful business benefits. Here are five of the most important:
To achieve this you not only need good people, good processes, but also supporting technology. It's quite amazing to see nowadays so many PMOs are still trying to manage project selection, prioritization, resource capability planning and deliverables via error prone spreadsheets.
Teams that have to handle multiple projects can't rely on their memories to keep them all organized. And trying to keep everything together in email is a recipe for disaster. To deliver projects on time and within budget, information needs to be written down, deadlines plotted, and documents shared. Team members need to be in constant communication with one another. That's the kind of information that quickly outgrows email threads and spreadsheets. When your team needs to get serious about managing projects, the solution is to get project management software. If your teams juggle deadlines, resources, and deliverables, they need a dedicated project management tool, Visual Paradigm can help keep your project management teams stay on track in the projects.
Now your team can kick-start any size of IT projects easily with our automated guide-through process that embedded step-by-step instructions, input references and samples and develop deliverables incrementally and collaboratively with your team members. Visual Paradigm can significantly enhance and streamline the entire process and allowing your term work collaboratively and effectively with automated task management and notifications with task manager in both desktop and/or over the cloud environment.
