What is a Project Management Office (PMO)?

Good day...

During the trainings that I delivered, I learnt that many organizations have project management office (PMO) role supporting their project delivery. Nevertheless, I found that in most of them, the PMO acts more as a project administrator instead of running the real PMO function. So, what is a real PMO should do?

In my role at the organization I am working for, I also oversee PMO function. In my case, the main responsibilities of a PMO includes:

1. Managing project portfolio. One of the key strategic roles of PMO is to have full visibility of all in-flight and pipeline projects and act as a portfolio manager (I will cover this in detail in my next posting). The role includes providing oversight to the running projects, reporting the health check status of each project to higher management, assisting the respective project managers in overcoming roadblocks within the project, and acting as the point of escalation for the issues that a project manager can not resolve by herself.

2. Resourcing. As we understand that sufficient and qualified resource is key to a project success, here PMO plays a vital role in mapping between resource supply and demand, assigning the right resource to the right project. Resource here is not limited to human resources, but also covers other resources such as testing server environment, vendors, etc.

3. Financial management. While project manager is accountable to financial aspect of a project, PMO provides validation service to the incoming invoices from vendors, checking of project expenses, reporting project financial status to management, and highlighting any occurrence or potential of budget overrun. In many projects PMO is also helping project managers in creating budget forecasting using a set of formula designated for each type of projects.

4. Demand management. In my organization, PMO also runs the function as an account manager to business units, collecting the initiatives from each business units, shortlisting the emerging initiatives and making a prioritization list based on an agreed framework. I will touch base this role in my next posting).

I also understand that in more mature organizations, project managers are reporting under project management office. Here PMO has the make sure alignment between one project to another in term of timeline, budget availability, resource allocation, and project priority. Ideally, PMO organization consists of veteran project managers who can help on-the-ground project managers to resolve their challenges, or, if necessary to provide assistance to the running projects both as a consultant or project expeditor.

Edwin

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