The year of the Project Management Office (PMO)?

Posted on | January 9, 2009 | Author: | lindsayascott | 2 Comments

Much has been written about PMO in 2008; there was the launch of P3O towards the end of the year, the first conference held by the PMI PMO SIG group in the States, numerous articles focused on Project Office, PMO, Portfolio Office and many more opinions on what organisations should be doing.

There’s a lack of information out there about the reality of PMO – especially in the UK – for example, just what are organisations doing today? Wouldn’t you love to have an insight into who’s doing what?, what the most common set up is? and is everyone else really doing much better than us?

In this years Project Management Report 2009 from Arras People we’re not only covering salary and rate reviews, this year we’re also looking at PMOs. Over 1000 project management professionals have been polled making this report the most comprehensive insight of the project management industry in the UK today. Questions around PMO include;

1. What level / area does your PMO function report to?
   
   With so many different reporting lines possible in today’s organisation this will give us an insight to the most common (and most successful?) organisational structure of the PMO
2. What does your PMO do? Do most PMOs in the UK just provide admin support? Do they provide value add services like reporting and planning? Are they predominantly Centres of Excellence providing best practice, governance and standards? Or are they a strategic PMO? Many people see PMOs has a value add service provider – but is this really true?
3. What benefits does your PMO function deliver to your organisation? Giving respondants the option to say “None” could be opening a can of worms but if this is the case, PMOs need to wake up and smell the coffee, it could be a tough ride in 2009. Equally the PMOs could be in a celebratory mood because they’re hitting their objectives of a common / consistent approach to delivery and management and their services are seen as a must-have. Which will it be?

There’s still time to contribute to the Project Management Report 2009 from Arras People, it only takes a few minutes and the report will be sent to you free of charge at the end of January. The report also includes salary benchmarking information, the outlook for 2009 and the thoughts and opinions on the new chartered status for project management

> Take part today (the survey closes on Monday 19th January 2009)

Oh yes – and if you’re one of these people who never wins anything in a prize draw – there’s M&S vouchers up for grabs (I’m hoping M&S weathers the High Street turmoil and you’ll still be able to spend them in February!)

Related posts:

1. Update to the “Understanding the PMO” section
2. Book Review: The Program Management Office Advantage
3. The many types of programme and project office professionals
4. Staffed by one person – me! Impacts on the PMO
5. New Year Thoughts!

Comments

2 Responses to “The year of the Project Management Office (PMO)?”

1. gunes sahillioglu
   January 20th, 2009 @ 9:31 pm

   Lindsay,

   I setup and ran PMO s for various organisations in UK, Continental Europe and US.

   UK is now quite close to US in terms of understanding PMO s value. Of course, you have to link it to the level of project management maturity of the organisation. This is why I developed a maturity model for PMO s.

   Having said that, I must add that there are still many people in UK (mostly recruiters) who use PMO to designate a person (project managenet officer, term that does not exist!). They also take liberties with PMO and use it for what would be better represented by PSO (project support office).

   So, I welcome this initiative. It will help clarify the terminology and higlight the value of the PMO for the enterprise.
   Rgds

   gunes

2. lindsayascott
   January 21st, 2009 @ 12:59 pm

   Thanks Gunes, you’ve left me intrigued by your maturity model for PMOs, any chance you can share it in some way??
   Twitter: projectmgmt

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