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How Do You Know if Your PMO is Successful? Part II: Standards Management Services

Project teams should see the value in the standards rather than seeing them as a constraint.

With standards management it is as important ‘how’ you achieve your measures of success as whether you achieve them.

Standards management is usually assigned to the PMO when:

  • the need for project results consistency requires a common set of approaches, methodologies, tools, standards are required to be developed, promulgated and managed
  • the value loss from projects (including their inability to meet expectations/planned results) is recognized as a problem to be dealt with.
The key is to get project teams to see the value in the standards rather than seeing them as a constraint or onerous burden. So you need to get project teams to use the agreed tool set intelligently, seeing that it enables them to deliver excellent results. In this way the project/value delivery capability of your organization will be progressively (and measurably) improved.

Your success can then be measured in terms of:

  • Number and type of tool set improvements implemented by period
  • Level of adoption and use (measured by compliance checks)
  • Tools usefulness (rated by project delivery team surveys)

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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