Program/Project Management

What is The Project Management Office (PMO)? It’s the hub where strategy and execution come together. A PMO is the spine of a successful project management approach for an organization. It is a function that provides decisions to support strategy. A PMO underpins the project delivery mechanisms by ensuring that all requirements, associated tasks and activities are managed using a controlled method.

LDM’s Standard for Portfolio, Program and Project Offices, the most mature PMOs provide:
PMOs provide:
  • Governance: ensuring that decisions are taken by the right people and based on the right information. The governance role can also include audit or peer reviews, development of project and program structures and ensuring accountability.
  • Transparency: providing information with a single source of the truth. Information should be relevant and accurate to support effective decision-making.
  • Reusability: stopping project teams from reinventing the wheel by being a central point for lessons learned, templates and best practice.
  • Delivery Support: making it easy for project teams to do their jobs by reducing bureaucracy, providing training, mentoring and maintaining quality assurance.
  • Traceability: providing the function for managing documentation, project history and organizational knowledge.
PMO teams fulfill a variety of functions on a day-to-day basis including, but not limited to:
  • Gathering data about project progress and producing reports
  • Developing standards and processes
  • Encouraging (or enforcing where necessary) the use of those standards and processes
  • Managing resources for projects
  • Delivering training and mentoring project team members
  • Managing dependencies across multiple projects
  • Tracking benefits
  • Reporting on financial information such as return on investment.