New PMO Lead or PMO Manager? Here are our top tips
If you’ve just been promoted to PMO Lead or PMO Manager, or you’ve recently started a new position at a new organisation, you may be looking for some helpful tips & advice around how best to run your Project Management Office and guide your Project Managers in order to get the very best results. Here, we’ll share some tips and advice for new PMO Leads & PMO Managers.
Tips and advice for new PMO Leads & PMO Managers
Build strong relationships: being a successful manager hinges on building good relationships both within your team and outside of it; with stakeholders and external teams alike. As such, spend time getting to know your team and colleagues; make an effort to meet people face to face, for an informal chat over coffee or a formal ideas meeting in a designated meeting room, whatever works for them! Introduce yourself, ask them questions, understand what they do and how you might be able to support them.
Foster collaboration & communication: collaboration and communication are key to a well-managed and efficient PMO and ensuring your team feels valued and listened to will, in turn, motivate them; improving morale and productivity. When creating your PMO Roadmap, for example, and planning projects, gather your team together and get their input, their opinions, ideas and feedback. This will help them to feel invested from the ground up.
Create clear processes: creating new, or adapting current, processes to fit exactly what you and your team would like to achieve will help everyone involved in the PMO to understand what’s expected of them and what to do should a risk, challenge or barrier arise; streamlining and standardising communications, actions and tasks whilst improving efficiency.
Report, report, report: reporting is an extremely important element of any PMO; providing teams and stakeholders with a clear idea of how projects are progressing, as well as a way of managing & mitigating upcoming risks and planning for the future. Ensuring that you make time to identify, report on and analyse key project metrics will be vital to your (and your projects’) success.
Move away from manual/Excel-based PMOs: Excel-based spreadsheets aren’t an ideal solution when it comes to data tracking, task allocation and reporting on PMOs, largely due to the fact that they’re localised; often existing in several different versions or copies, and the most up-to-date version can be challenging to locate. Moving away from Excel and to a cloud or app-based PMO solution such as Sycamore Gap’s PMO – with automated dashboard/reporting – will help you and your team keep track of all metrics associated with your projects, providing everyone involved with appropriate levels of access and insight, saving everyone valuable time, especially when reporting!
Becoming a PMO Lead or PMO Manager is a lot of responsibility but the right tools and processes are sure to help you, your project team(s) and your projects succeed.
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