The PMO Programme

Ok, so I’ve been introduced to the team as the new PMO manager. Some of them – the old hands, the IT project mangers in particular – raised their eyebrows and shook their heads. PMO to them is a needless layer of bureaucracy stopping them from just getting on with the job. Others look blankly at me and a few – the business managers, new to the programme and new to project based work, dragged from their day job and thrown into this strange and alien world – look at me with hope and expectation.

Right now all these people, along with everyone else on the programme, have different ideas about what a PMO means to them – ideas that range from no idea to negative preconceptions brought from other, less successful, programmes. It’s time to set some expectations….

The PMO Vision

OGC’s P3O manual suggests that one of the first things I need to do is to communicate a vision for the PMO – a simple statement of what the PMO is and what it can offer. But what should that vision look like?

I start back at basics with my view of the three things a programme PMO is for:

1. To reduce risk to the programme
2. To enable delivery of programme objectives
3. To support change in the organization

This seems a bit too vague, even for a vision statement – after all, aren’t these three things that every member of the programme team should be doing? Back to the P3O manual, then – but I don’t much like their vision statements – the examples given are for portfolio and hub PMOs, not temporary programme PMOs like mine. I start to flick through the remainder of the manual and, yet again, find myself thinking about the whys and wherefores of PMO rather than getting on with delivering it. By now I’ve spent half an hour thinking about my PMO vision statement and I’ve got precisely nowhere.

Time for a different tack. How about this – what would I tell the MD if he came to visit the programme? I’d probably say something like:

“The PMO ensures the integrity of the programme. It makes sure that every team understands what the programme expects from it and what it can expect from the programme. The PMO supports the Programme Manager and the governance meetings by providing a single source of project data; it anticipates issues and raises them at the right level to enable rapid decision making. It reduces risk to the programme and ensures delivery by taking an oversight of the programme and supporting project managers in delivering their objectives.”

Ok, so it’s a little wordy, maybe, and there are no targets or measures – but it’s a start. Like many things in a programme PMO, the vision doesn’t have to be perfect, but it needs to be there and it needs to be good enough (just!).

See also: How To: PMO Vision Statement