Whilst each company’s Programme Management Office will be different and vary in terms of scope of service (typically based on their industry, company size, complexity of projects and level of delivery maturity), there are four common steps to achieving a high performing PMO.
- Vision and strategy. Quickly mobilise to understand your ambition for your PMO. How do the services that the PMO provides underpin the company’s vision and strategy; are there changes that need to be made? It is vital that all key stakeholders sign up to this vision and strategy.
- Maturity assessment. An organisation may have a PMO or may be starting from scratch. For those with a Programme Management Office, you need to understand your current capability maturity, agree where you want it to be and work out with you the action plan to make it happen.
- Design, build and implement. Once you understand the current maturity and the target state for your PMO you can then start to implement the changes needed. This is typically done in sprints to deliver value early rather than waiting until everything is ready to go. Agreeing key design principles and then incrementally building and implementing the PMO capability will see greater value delivered early.
- Transition to business as usual. This is typically done concurrently with Step 3 and ensures that the embedding of the PMO processes and methodology is done in a timely way. By becoming part of BAU, it will be the approach that all the delivery team start to use naturally and will ensure capability across people, process, information and technology.
The key to implementation and maturing of your Programme Management Office function is to be very clear on the services that your PMO is going to provide, the authority that it has in the delivery process and ensuring there is full stakeholder buy-in to the PMO. Working in the PMO is a specialist role, and whilst some PMO experts have come through the Project Management route, others have chosen PMO from the start of their careers.
Make sure that you have the right skilled people in place throughout your PMO, including a PMO Director, PMO Manager and PMO analysts. Finally, by having a senior executive as the sponsor or owner of the PMO, it will demonstrate the importance of the PMO to the organisation and give it further credibility.