PMO stands for Project Management Office and is responsible for the overall project management of a company. It is a group that provides a centralized management of multi-division projects. When an organization needs to manage numerous projects it becomes crucial to define project management processes and standards. This is done by the PMO.
Importance of PMO:
A successful PMO effectively aligns the current and future projects with the company’s strategy so as to ensure they provide value to the organization. Based on which projects will help accelerate the business, the PMO manages the project portfolio and prioritizes high-yielding projects.
By maintaining employee data and effectively planning the use of resources for optimal results, the PMO helps facilitate the decision making process. There are various project management tools that provide PMOs full control over planning, organizing, tracking and reporting on projects.
Important Business Benefits of PMO:
- Delivers valuable business results:
A project manager aims to provide quality results from a project while keeping it on schedule and avoiding budget overruns. But it is equally important to ensure they are being completed in the correct way with the help of a competent team. For this, proper resource allocation and prioritization of projects that stimulate the business growth is crucial.
A PMO ensures proper portfolio management to set and measure the right KPIs for a project. This allows thorough assessment of organizational projects to make sure they are meeting business needs. Since the projects are managed based on corporate strategy, they deliver valuable business results.
- Increases accountability:
A good project manager keeps team members accountable for their role in the project, but it may not always pan out as planned. The PMO can provide an external perspective to maintain the company strategy in projects and help optimize accountability of resources. This keeps teams on track to achieve designated goals and deliverables.
Many times projects struggling due to poor management of resources and lack of budget planning need support to get back on track. The PMO can help take well-planned decisions to hold the project team’s performance to company standards and prevent it from failing.
A PMO is responsible for overseeing any risks a project might face based on the project portfolio and for strategizing to overcome them. When project managers fail to identify pitfalls or convey information about any issues properly, PMO can verify portfolio data to gauge the situation.
With the help of complete visibility into detailed project data, PMO increases transparency of all current and upcoming projects. This not only provides centralized storage of project data, but also provides stakeholders all the necessary information about the process progress.
Based on project allocations, PMO maintains team data along with their skills and capacity. This helps in monitoring individual progress and sheds light on company-wide performance statistics. For instance, these insights could reveal how a team member excels only in certain project types and cannot be allocated to another project, making it difficult to utilize them properly.
Such dependencies that affect projects and schedules help in better allocation of resources. It also helps in highlighting areas of improvement that will help projects provide greater revenue to the organization. If you notice most of your projects are getting delayed, the PMO can then try to assess the reason for this and streamline the structure for more effective planning.
Conclusion:
A lot of businesses are now gravitating towards PMO and needless to say, PMO’s value will continue to increase in coming years as more and more organizations strategize to improve their business processes. Does your business have a PMO? How has it benefited your organization? Let us know in the comments below!
