Think of a PMO as the glue that binds everything together. In a nutshell, A PMO is a department or a group of people whose main purpose is to facilitate project success by establishing best practices, mitigating risks, and putting processes in place that ensure a standardised approach is taken with projects, products, or programmes. In this blog, we will review how a PMO can add value to your business, and through its guidance how it can help to streamline processes, save costs, and increase efficiency.
Roles & responsibilities of a PMO:
- Strategic Planning and Governance
PMO establishes a project governance framework to have a structured approach to managing projects. The objective of a governance structure is to ensure that projects are prioritised and aligned correctly depending on the strategic objectives of the business. It also helps to identify that the correct people or team have access to the right information to make the right decisions which helps in turn to keep projects within budget, on schedule and those resources are used in the most efficient manner. It also provides portfolio oversight and manage the overall portfolio value, and identify risks, analyse risks, and plan risk responses at a portfolio level. - Creating and Maintaining Project Artifacts
PMOs provide templates and tools to manage project efforts. This helps to provide reliable data, which in time enables early visibility into project performance for better decision-making. A standardised reporting frameworks also mean that people can contribute more quickly and consistently to the project as they know what is expected from them. - Best Practices and Processes
PMO provides, develops, and maintains best practices and processes to ensure that all business processes and procedures are compliant across the project, product, or programme lifecycles. Since PMO maintains documentation for every project, this helps with increased accuracy of resource allocation, time estimation, budget valuation, and training management. - Resource Management
Effective resource management is an important responsibility that the PMO team undertakes. It constructs a resource plan and creates visibility of availability for all the stakeholders. They also ensure the resource is used efficiently and that all project related activities are tracked. - Team Communication and Culture
Team communication and collaboration are some of the important tasks to be managed by PMO. This can be achieved by promoting a culture that ensures that all the teams across different locations are on the same page and the tasks are being done on time without any delays.
Benefits of A PMO:
A PMO has an overall view of the businesses portfolio of projects and therefore has the ability to support the business effectively. It provides information and data in a number of areas which supports a team throughout the duration of the project. As a result, the PMO brings a sense of organisation and repetition to a project and because of this, it delivers key benefits such as visibility, accuracy, cost savings, and overall standardisation.
- Improving Visibility
PMO team provides visibility of all projects to stakeholders by providing reports and centralising all projects and the project documentation into one system, so as to give better understanding and visibility from a project and the business points of view. - Increased Accuracy & Cost Savings
The PMO increases the accuracy of projects in terms of the budget, resources, and schedule associated with them. Providing accuracy can ensure that projects are less likely to fail and also that the project teams are more likely to be consistent with their output. This in turn will reduce the chances of changes needing to be made and making changes to projects is where you tend to spend money that has not been budgeted for. - Improved Consistency
As PMO maintains the standards and best practices for the projects, your project team does not have to work on it, they just need to follow the guidelines provided by the PMO team, which increases consistency and lets them focus on delivering the project. - Centralised Knowledge
Another key advantage is that they keep new learnings and processes all in one place which helps all stakeholders to have knowledge especially when it comes to lessons learned. If one team is facing some issue and has found the solution for the same, PMO puts the same in their centralised data, which other teams can use if in case they face a similar issue. - Resource Availability and Allocation
PMO ensures resource availability and allocation to the project. They provide the best-skilled resources for the project. If a project requires a Project manager, the PMO team can provide a project manager as per the skills required in the project. They not only provide the resource but also keep track of the utilisation of the resource.
With the value that a PMO can provide for a business, it is important that it is done in a manner that will balance the existing structure of the organisation. Aspira can aid and mentor organisations to develop and put in place the necessary structures and supporting tools to allow for the coordinated and well-managed governance and operation of projects across the organisation.
If you would like to discuss your Project Management requirements in more detail, please get in touch with our team today.
Chloe Hanlon - PMO Analyst
Chloe is a PMO Analyst with Aspira. Over her career, Chloe has worked across a multitude of industries, from Retail to Construction to IT and through those experiences she understands the importance of bringing people and processes together to provide value to our client’s business objectives.
