3 Benefits of a Project Management Office (PMO)

A Project Management Office (PMO) is a department or group of people that defines and maintains standards related to project management within an organization. More importantly, as an extension of defining and maintaining these standards, a PMO is responsible for the successful execution and implementation of projects that fall under their jurisdiction.

An enterprise-wide project management office is beneficial for the following 3 reasons:

A PMO Creates and Implements Consistent Systems and Processes

One of the most noticeable benefits of a project management office is its ability to create and implement consistent systems and processes. Companies become successful for a number of reasons; they have a great product, great salespeople, are innovative, or a combination of factors leads to their success. With success comes growth, and with growth comes growing pains.

There is a certain mindset that occurs with exponential growth. A colleague of a fast growing company once expressed the sentiment, “any decision that moves the company forward is the right decision.” The spirit of what he was saying was that you can’t take time to slow down in a fast growing company and methodically analyze every possible solution to a decision that needs to be made. Rather, people need to make decisions in real time in order to keep things moving.

This works great in theory. However, long-term, what it introduces is very inconsistent, unpredictable, and sometimes unreliable ways of getting the work out the door, whatever that work may be. Once a company has reached that level of disorganization, it is a great relief for everyone affected to have an objective third party (PMO) come in and smooth things out.

Members of the project management office identify the systems and processes that are working, get rid of those that aren’t, and fill in any missing gaps.

A PMO Is An Objective Source of Truth

Another benefit to implementing a project management office is that there is one objective location to find the truth. What does this mean? If it is set up properly, a PMO will not have any resources reporting directly to them (other than project managers and perhaps some business analysts). As such, there is nothing to hide or cover up when it comes to reporting on project status.

If a department is running their own projects, they may not be quite as objective in reporting out the true status of things. We’re not talking about people deliberately lying, but rather providing their own version of the truth. For example, a department may know they missed a deliverable date. But, they also know that by the time the next status meeting comes around they will be able to catch up, so choose not to report it as a potential risk. Then, if an emergency happens, this deliverable never gets finished and now the project is in crisis mode.

A project management office provides visibility such that these negative consequences are avoided. If the deliverable was not completed on time, and a clear (and near) end date was not forthcoming, this would have been reported as a potential risk. This would have given the project sponsor or company executives the ability to do something about it so it didn’t get out of control.

The president of a software development company once told me that he uses the person who runs his project management office as the barometer for how well (or poorly) things are going on within the company. “If he’s a little on edge, I know I need to dig into the details and see where I need to help. If he’s calm, cool, and collected I just go to lunch. I know everything is going just fine.”

A PMO Introduces Economies of Scale

A project management office also reduces or eliminates duplicated efforts and wasted resources. If someone doesn’t have an overarching view of the activity happening within a company, similar projects and initiatives can start to appear in multiple locations when there really is no need. One solution would suffice, but the people that are working on the other solutions are not aware that there already is a solution. A project management office prevents duplication of efforts by coordinating amongst various departments and only expending the effort necessary to get the job done…once.