A PMO (Project Management Office) is an integral component of many organizations. For those of you who are already familiar with PMOs, it’s likely you have a good understanding of what can go wrong with a PMO – you may even have experienced some of these challenges firsthand! At MustardSeed, we understand that challenges abound when it comes to running a successful PMO. The key to establishing a high-value PMO, then, lies in identifying, correcting, and preventing these challenges. This article is meant to provide PMO leaders, business executives, and project managers with a roadmap for how to identify and tackle PMO problems as they arise.
Challenge 1: Misalignment of the PMO’s role within the business
Occasionally, business leaders don’t exactly know what a PMO is or what it does. Perhaps they have a general understanding that the PMO runs meetings, manages schedules, and chases down tasks that are past-due. While these are all true examples of roles PMOs often fulfill, it is essential that business leaders understand that PMOs are not administrative at their core – they are strategic. While you do need a stellar project manager to keep administrative ducks in a row, that is not the highest purpose of a great project leader. Instead, a great project manager brings foresight and understanding of how a specific decision or change in one area can affect downstream plans and other areas of the business. They should have a direct line to business leaders to provide critical updates and prevent risks from turning into issues. In this way, the PMO acts like an insurance policy, protecting the business against future harm. From our experience, this is something only an expert project manager can offer, not something a system or AI can provide.
Challenge 2: Lack of PMO leadership representation at company-wide planning sessions
Not including PMO leaders in company-wide strategic planning is one of the biggest mistakes executive leaders can make. The PMO is charged with the strategic and day-to-day execution of your company’s most important projects. Project managers have insight into on-the-ground project operations, cross-functional team dynamics, and how changes are likely to be received by project teams. Given this knowledge, shouldn’t your PMO leader be involved in planning for the future? Allowing your PMO leader access to these conversations early gives them time to plan and speak up if there are potential issues. Often, programs and projects are dropped in the lap of a PMO after they are already under-budget, under-resourced, or under-planned. Inviting PMO leaders to become an integral part of company planning sessions can help identify those issues before they start.
Challenge 3: Lack of PMO resources
Limited resources are a common challenge across most organizations. Finite resources like time, money, and people can be hard to come by, and project leaders know this. There is frequently a push to do more with less, but there’s a fine line between pushing your company to do the most it possibly can and burning the candle from both ends. When a project manager identifies resources as an issue, the PMO leader must engage with other department leads to problem solve. Ultimately, the PMO leader may need to come to an agreement with business leaders that the project plan will have to shift to encompass what is possible with the resources available – and that may be a smaller scope than was originally envisioned. Unfortunately, resource issues can occur even with planning in advance and doing your due diligence. A PMO leader must track such issues and know when to alert key business leaders.
Challenge 4: PMO scope creep
It’s cliché, but I have to mention scope creep, because it really is that important! Scope creep is so common that identifying it is often one of the first lessons learned by new project managers. While some scope creep is expected on any project, management of scope creep should be at the top of the list for a PMO leader. If your organization has common scope creep issues, one of two things might be happening: (1) Your organization may not be planning out the full scope of a project well enough during the chartering process; or (2) Your organization may be better aligned to an Agile project management process, instead of traditional Waterfall.
Challenge 5: Schedule mismanagement
Have you ever reached out to a task assignee to ask when they will be done with something, only to hear “I’m not sure, probably sometime next quarter. Can we just say sometime between April 1 and June 30, so you have a date?” This response is a project manager’s worst nightmare! It’s essential to have concrete dates because it’s impossible to manage a schedule with care if it’s built on a foundation of dates as wobbly as a Jello mold. Failure to pin down firm date assumptions in the schedule could put future dependent tasks at a major risk, and resources could be pulled from the project. A PMO should be tracking metrics like on-time performance, and this is totally impossible if even a portion of the dates within a schedule are based on wide date range estimates. PMO leaders must be frank with their counterparts who are task assignees: solid dates that the entire team can begin marching toward are essential.
PMOs face challenges like all other departments; however, the specific problems facing a PMO leader are unique. It takes a thoughtful approach to identify a solution to every problem that might creep into your PMO. If you are facing issues like those described in this article at your organization, I highly recommend reaching out to a project management professional, like those available at MustardSeed, to talk through how enhancing your PMO can strengthen your overall business.