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How Do You Know if Your PMO is Successful? Part I: Constraints Management Services

A project should never lose value due to a known organisational constraint.

All organisations have constraints on how many (and how well) they can do projects. PMO constraints management is required when:

  • the volume of projects is such that no overall view is known
  • projects decisions are made in isolation but draw on a common pool of resources, funds and impact the same business areas
  • management need/want an overall view of ‘what’s happening’ and the future implications.
The goal is to ensure no project is constrained by or loses value due to a known organisational constraint through timely action to resolve any potential problems or constraints, harnessing whatever power and authority is required to remove the constraint. The measures of success can, therefore, be:
  • Demand forecast accuracy
  • Progress reporting ease of understanding, accuracy, timeliness and relevance including identification of the key issues/trends for management
  • Total value delivered versus business case/approved plans
  • Investment portfolio status and profile — plus trends over time
  • Future resource needs visibility/analysis.
How do your PMO measurements stack up?

Further support and useful tools to help you manage your investments, projects and portfolio are available from valuedeliverymanagement.com.

For the previous series by Jed Simms visit "PMO: What’s in a name?".

Jed Simms is CIO magazine's project management columnist. Simms, founder of projects and benefits delivery research firm Capability Management, is also the developer of specialised project management and project governance Web site valuedeliverymanagement.com

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Comments

1

pradeep.bhanot

Wed 01/04/2009 - 21:12

PMO Role

Jed, I am looking forward to seeing what responses you get to this blog post. I thought you might be interested in a recent study on PMO Value, which discusses what PMO’s are most often used for. I posted a summary of the research and a link to the full report on my blog at http://clarity-in-emea.blogspot.com, and I’d be interested to see what you think of the findings.

The following is taken from the report:

Most of the respondents see themselves as strategic contributors in some shape or form, either finding that they have a well balanced mix of strategy versus operational activities, or launching new products or supporting the company in maintaining competitiveness. Altogether, 77% are using the PMO for a variety of strategic purposes, whether it’s ‘running strategic projects most of the time’ (25%), ‘a good balance of fire-fighting and executing strategic projects’ (22%), supporting company growth and competitiveness’ (19%), or ‘supporting the launch of new products’ (11%). Only 19% state that the PMO is used for ‘fire-fighting and keeping the lights on most of the time’.

These findings are reassuring. It demonstrates that the respondents perceive themselves (and their PMO) not simply as mere executers, but instead as real partners to the business and critical to their company’s success.

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