A Project Management Office (PMO) is the administrative mechanism by which a focal point is provided for organizational project management activities.
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An effective project management office is aligned with the strategic planning goals of the organization and should be able to show visible value to the bottom-line.
25 Reasons to Deploy a PMO
- Capturing project requests and ensuring each request meets basic PMO requirements.
- Keeping an up-to-date repository of projects underway and requests pending review.
- Managing a resource forecast to help understand resource availability for projects.
- Achieving in cost reduction through efficient, centralized services
- Having a direct impact on the bottom-line of the organization by cutting cut project overruns.
- Contributing to project quality assurance.
- Improving IT and business efficiency in delivering projects consistently within time and budget.
- Defining a set of project management standards, guidelines, and methods that can be used consistently throughout the organization by project and program managers.
- Managing the shared portfolio, program and project management methodology and processes across the organization.
- Ensuring the defined project management standards and procedures are followed.
- Managing and facilitating the portfolio management process.
- Implementing a scoring and prioritization model to assess which project requests should be approved.
- Facilitating project portfolio management with a selection of projects to make sure the organization works on the right things at the right time.
- Providing a centralized and consistent governance reporting model.
- Ensuring that stakeholders have up-to-date, accurate information with a frequency and format they understand.
- Providing big picture master project view to understand dependencies and risks.
- Providing audit trails for large projects to ensure compliance with regulatory compliance.
- Offering advice and support to project stakeholders.
- Becoming a source of training, guidance, and mentoring for project managers.
- Providing on-going services to make sure that problems stay solved.
- Become the guardian of the project knowledge base.
- Implement a program and project gating review process to make sure on-going compliance with business cases.
- Centralized archive of lessons learned.
- Provide consultancy on-demand to project stakeholders, sponsors, business owners, and IT owners
- Implement a continuous improvement program for portfolio, program, project and resource management.
Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in June 2015 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.