Has Your PMO Jumped the Shark?

I would personally like to make April on PM Tips an unofficial “PMO discussion” month.  I plan to do several articles on Project Management Office (PMO) related topics and I definitely welcome your feedback.  And the April survey – which I hope to have ready in the next couple of days – will be about PMOs and their effectiveness. For this article, to kick things off, I’d like to discuss the PMO director position.  I’ve personally been part of PMOs at three different organizations.  I’d like to say that they’ve been effective PMOs and efficiently run, but they really haven’t been.  And in those PMOs, there have been five PMO directors while I was involved with each of those organizations.  In all other organizations where I acted in the role of project manager, no formal PMO existed. In an article from October 2009 entitled “Criteria for Successful Project Management Offices,” I wrote: For PMO to be Effective:

• Director must be a key role in the organization
  • Must have backing and support of executive management
• Director must champion the efforts of the PMs
  • Don’t take credit for their actions
  • Provide ongoing support
  • Assist on critical/visible projects
  • Help breakdown resource acquisition barriers
• Director must run the PMO, not many projects
  • Project focus for the director should mainly be on the highly visible projects were exec decision-making is going to be needed on a regular basis or the business is extremely critical to the organization
  • Organization must value the PMO enough to ensure the director is not bogged down too much to be a successful leader

I strongly feel that the PMO director, in order to be effective, must have the technical and project management background to be taken seriously and to fully understand what the project managers in the PMO are facing and the needs they have.  But they must also have the management skills to pull it off.  Sadly, that is often not the case – and that’s not a horrible thing.  It’s a rare thing to find individuals who have both the experience needed in the specific field and the leadership experience to lead those same positions into battle. The first PMO that I was part of experienced two iterations, neither of which worked.  In both cases, the leader was not a project manager, really had no technical background, and was not someone with any clout in the organization. Therefore, they were not able to make life easier for us (as project managers) or effectively guide us because they did not have the PM experience themselves to fully understand the role. In the second case, the PMO director basically did nothing more than lead a Friday PMO group conference call and run a few projects himself.  Again, not effective and other than acknowledging his authority over the project managers, none of the project managers really had any use for him.  There was no mentoring, no real guidance, and no real interest displayed from him. In the third case, the PMO was eventually co-directed.  A classic example of it having ‘jumped the shark’ (see image above).  Both PMO directors were leading projects and better yet – both led the Friday PMO group call.  It boiled down to just a share-the-news meeting that no one felt obligated to attend.  In fact, if you attended it, then you probably weren’t busy enough. The PMO director needs clout within the organization, they need to have an interest in the development of their project managers, and they need to have a technical knowledge and project management background to be able to understand what obstacles their teams are facing and be able to counsel them on how to deal with issues. I’d appreciate hearing your feedback on this as well as positive and negative PMO experiences you’ve had.