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Prepare an Actionable Roadmap for Your PMO

Creating an effective Project Management Office (PMO) requires a strategic approach to turn planning into actionable steps. This guide provides a comprehensive roadmap to establish a PMO that balances project management, resource allocation, and organizational change management. By addressing common challenges such as communication silos, shifting priorities, and accountability issues, the guide outlines a structured PMO timeline. Key steps include defining the PMO’s purpose, staffing it with the right roles, developing a detailed plan, and ensuring alignment with organizational goals. This approach not only enhances the PMO’s value as a support system but also ensures sustainable business outcomes and efficient project execution.

The Challenge

PMOs get pulled into day-to-day project and resourcing issues, making it difficult to focus on running a portfolio. Many PMOs are dealing with:

• Teammates who seem unphased by overdue tasks and missed milestones.
• Fire drills that happen more often than planned projects.
• Resources that are allocated and then redirected to something more urgent.
• Communication that is stuck in silos, leading to confusion about priorities.
• Due dates that mysteriously shift without explanation.
• Project teams that are more focused on the due date than adoption and outcomes.

Common Obstacles

• Many people see the PMO as nothing more than a source of red tape rather than a helpful support system. This impacts staffing and hiring.
• The PMO is often misunderstood as a center for project management governance, when it also needs to facilitate the communication of project data from project teams to decision makers to ensure that appropriate decisions get made around resourcing, approval of new projects, etc.
• Accountability is something that is not clearly defined for many activities that low through the PMO. Business leaders, project workers, and project managers are rarely as aligned as they need to be.

Recommendations

Prepare an actionable roadmap for your PMO by executing the following steps.

1. Get a departmental job description first. Defining your PMO may not be as simple as it seems. Explore the boundaries of portfolio, project, resource, and organizational change management before jumping ahead with processes and tools.
2. The staffing plan should come before your long-term plan. Get buy-in around your definition of the roles needed to run your PMO before articulating a long-term plan. Too often, plans have been accepted without the commensurate level of staffing. Placing hiring on the roadmap can act as a predecessor to accountability.
3. Keep your eye on the ball. Build your PMO around the operational imperative to recognize completed projects as an early milestone in broader changes. Projects exist to create change.

PMO Timeline

Preparing an actionable roadmap for your PMO involves turning planning into action with a realistic PMO timeline. A realistic timeline will follow the following steps.

Define

The first step to creating an actionable roadmap is to define the right kind of PMO. This step will help to establish the purpose of your PMO. Identify organizational needs to fill in gaps instead of duplicating efforts. A properly run portfolio reconciles demand (project requests) to supply (available people) and drives throughput by approving the amount of projects that can get done.

Staff

The second step is to staff the PMO for resilience. During this step, analyze the staffing requirements for your PMOs mandate and create purpose-built role descriptions. Your best project manager should be running projects, not the PMO.

Plan

The next step is to prepare an actional roadmap. The difference in a winning PMO is determined by a roadmap or plan created at the beginning. Leaders should understand the full scope of the plan before committing their teams to the project. Too often, PMOs focus on project management rigor and plan to do portfolio management after that’s done. But few successfully maintain the process long enough to get there. Starting with portfolio management could help leadership soften their demands for project management rigor.

Execute

The last step is to align the project to the organizational strategic plan. When you are determining what your PMO will provide in the future, it is important to align the ambition of the PMO with the maturity of the business. Use the power of organizational change management to ensure success and adoption. Iterate through the finer points of planning and executing to deploy the kind of PMO defined, the people descripted, and the strategic roadmap articulated. Don’t forget why the idea got approved in the first place. The goal is to sustain beneficial business outcomes well beyond the completion of your project.

Benefits

Information Technology Benefits

Following these steps will help to determine how t o fill gaps and not duplicate efforts to bring value to the organization. It will also ensure that key PMO capabilities like portfolio management, project management, and organizational change management are in balance. Following this approach will also ensure that staffing is purpose-driven and will help avoid putting good people in the wrong role.

Business Benefits

This approach helps to ensure that intake and governance are a primary focus rather than afterthoughts of someone primarily focused on project management methodology. It also allows the business to avoid unrealistic commitments by ensuring better upfront analysis of ability to execute and ensure appropriately mandated sponsor management.

Source: Info-Tech Research Group

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