PMOs are a vital part of large organisations, but what makes an effective PMO?
Considering what makes an effective PMO? –
The Project Management Office (PMO) is a business function with two primary purposes:
- Define and maintain the standards of organisational project management
- Assist the organisation to make better decisions about projects
PMOs deliver value to their stakeholders as the source of vital metrics, guidance, and reporting. With this in mind, what makes an effective PMO?
What makes an effective PMO?
An effective PMO implements economies of repetition, finding ways to improve, automate and repeat processes that make completing projects to a set standard possible and achievable by all.
PMOs do this in conjunction with business needs and goals; ensuring projects and processes align with the top level requirements of the organisation.
In order to achieve this, effective PMOs require easy access to key metrics, allowing them to track and report on project KPIs.
Effective PMOs must also act with intention, knowledge and from experience, particularly to minimise and mitigate project risks and change – ensuring projects run to time and to budget.
What’s more, PMOs should always look for new ways to leverage tools and software to identify and mitigate said risks, encourage open and timely communication within and between project teams, and monitor progress, as well as effectively communicate lessons learned on completion of a project.
Effective PMOs are centred around:
- Efficiency
- Communication
- Risk mitigation
- Quality control
PMOs frequently rely heavily on Excel to manage project artefacts; creating data silos that come with a wealth of issues:
- Miscommunication
- Duplication of work
- Inefficient use of time (updating and amending spreadsheets or repurposing data for reports)
- Inaccessible metrics or changing document versions that are untracked or lost
These issues contribute to inefficiencies and inaccuracies.
In order to improve the efficiency and processes of an organisation and their projects, a PMO must be efficient in itself.
To address the issues identified above, we’ve created a pre-built PMO solution; a single app with role-based access, one-click dashboards and report & document automation – all designed to improve the productivity, communication and efficiency of PMOs and their project teams.
What’s more, our PMO is easily adapted and integrated to your current systems and processes.
To find out more about how Sycamore Gap’s pre-built PMO solution could help you and your team, please book a demo or email [email protected].