What makes a successful PMO?  A great deal of hard work?  Definitely.  But there are some other ingredients in that “special sauce” that enables a PMO to succeed.  Let’s explore.

A few years ago Jack Welsh of GE fame lead a keynote speech on large programs.  He was presenting to the business leaders of some of the largest enterprises in the world.  The speech began something like this:

Expanding beyond team/social collaboration to business collaboration

 The term “collaboration” has become one of the primary hot topics for businesses and analysts throughout the industry lately.  At its most basic level, “collaboration” simply means “working with others in a coordinated fashion toward a common goal.”  But few actually attempt to define what it really means in the context of business and PPM.

When I was running the IT-PMO at PeopleSoft we faced an interesting dilemma. As we finished work on the integration of JD Edwards there was a ton of unmet demand for IT work from all corners of the enterprise. This ranged from tweaks to the purchasing system to an all-new global training environment. We quickly realized even our ability to analyze the demand would be swamped by the incoming flood of work.

 So, we devised a scoring system. Why? There were three main reasons, all of which really comprise some fundamental principles when creating a scoring model.

This year the Daptiv team attended Gartner Symposium/ITxpo 2012 in Orlando for the world’s biggest industry conference focused on IT leaders with over 8,000 senior IT executives (including 2,000 CIOs). Here are some of our takeaways from the Gartner sessions at the event:

(1) Nexus of Forces: Gartner predicted the need for senior IT and business executives to re-imagine business as the result of a powerful nexus of forces — mobile, social, cloud and information. This Nexus of Forces reflects how people want to interact with each other and their information and will make many existing IT architectures, organizational structures and IT strategies obsolete. Gartner forecast that there would be 5 billion mobile devices by 2015 and an 18% annual growth of cloud-based solutions leading up to 2016.

 

PMOs and project managers are faced with failing projects more often than they would like to and it often turns out to be a demoralizing experience for all stakeholders. Consequently, it is vital for PMOs to recognize the signs of a failing project and take corrective action before it is too late. In order to engineer a successful turnaround, PMOs and PMs need to watch for certain leading indicators of project failure.

This is a question that has been posed many times and answered many times. Yet, we continue to see PMOs failing very often. Does it mean that the answers that have been presented are incorrect? Not necessarily. In fact, most answers surrounding metrics and value are relevant but don't address the question of "fit". The metrics that make sense for one business may not make sense for another.

At the end of the day it is about demonstrating value to the business as a whole. A successful PMO is a PMO that is focused on business value and helps the C-suite succeed in its strategic objectives. Daptiv's four-part PMO Success Webinar series explores this in more detail. The goal of the webinar series is to provide real-world insights on how PMOs can become strategic assets to the business.