IT Transformation: How to Build a Solid PMO Roadmap

PMO Throughput is Ultimate Measure of PMO Effectiveness.

Enterprise project/program management office (PMO) plays a significant role in executing business strategy via implementing the portfolio of projects effectively & efficiently. However, most of the PMOs get stuck at the lower level of management maturity. Therefore, more than half of IT projects fail to meet customers’ expectation. In order to improve project success rate, building a solid PMO is perhaps the right step in the transformational journey.

Set milestones via identifying key business problems, low hanging fruits and pain points. It depends upon if your PMO is focused on Project, Program or Portfolio management, or some combination of the three, as well as what business problems you're trying to solve with it. first, start off with the low hanging fruit and pain points that projects were experiencing, then, take those pain points and identified solutions and standards around them, after that, work to identify those activities and deliverables and compiled a list of standard milestones, and next, take that list of milestones and developed a project schedule around those milestones with the basic tasks need to achieve the milestones and put it into schedule. This gives a project team a basis when starting a new project. It also includes creating standards or best practices in helping to develop corporate level processes and guidelines

Re-evaluating and re-establishing a set of PMO groups. if there are multiple PMOs, and the important thing on the roadmap is to be very explicit about the charters for each team so that there are no gaps and no overlaps. Aim to have each one serving the other appropriately and effectively with a free-flowing pipeline of information and 'next steps' or handoffs between them that aspire to be relatively seamless. Following that is to figuring out the end-to-end lifecycles in both product management and software application / systems management and identifying where the intersections are between the IT and the business, and determining which group owns which processes or activities and for that, There are discussions about the business decision support needs and the questions that must be asked and answered at each stage of the lifecycle

The PMO has good departmental metrics to pass to the leadership team. The roadmap can back up a few steps in order to rapidly move forward. The managers know who is doing what, know what utilization and availability looked like, know what relative priorities are, and in general, get with the program, schedule deliverable dates to give to the customers. The goal is to be of service, and not just focus on reporting and managerial communications

PMO 'throughput”-the volume of work PMO could get through the department, in terms of requests in, and deliverables back out. That is the ultimate measure of PMO effectiveness since the PMO is there to enable others to be more efficient and work more effectively.  If you aren't improving throughput, then you aren't meeting a core part of your mission 

 

Try to move up the PMO Maturity Scale. The PMO owns the project process, its metrics and process improvement goals; it generates best practices; it owns the project manager role and consequently has a responsibility to ensure all projects has a trained project manager who knew how to do the job. Identification of some project milestones and compile them into a standard framework, time tracking to build the experience for estimating.

Level 1: Ad-hoc - Discipline has few, if any, formal definitions and is performed on an ad-hoc basis.

Level 2: Defined - Discipline is defined, executed and repeatable.

Level 3: Controlled - Discipline objectives are aligned with business goals and defined with greater details. Results are qualitatively predictable.

Level 4: Measured - Quantitative goals are clearly set and measured.

Level 5: Optimized - There is a focus on continually improving the discipline performance.

PMO has a crucial short-term role in the cross-departmental execution of projects, and a hybrid role in the long-term planning around the organizational strategic goal, a comprehensive PMO roadmap with well set of milestones can surely help the organization achieve high-performance result in a systematic way.

Posted in: IT Strategy/Roadmap,Project Management