PMO Is acronym words stand for Project Management Office and its advanced level of project management that is controlling documentation and project management standards. Without loss of professionality, you may extend the acronym to Portfolio Management Office, and Program Management Office.
PMO is known as an outsource office or department that contains different employees’ skills in which the manager and employees should plan, organize and report the project statuses in the organization, to maintain and meet the highest efficiency, better cost, and excellent timing to develop projects execution.
What is PMO? (Video)
PMO Definition
PMO is “A group of consistent internal and external entities (stakeholders, interest groups, … etc.) which defines, maintains, and ensures standards for project management to deliver strategic initiatives”.
Source: PMO Global Institute, PMO Guidebook®, 1st ed, 2020 | PMO Definintion
Planning in PMO
The project management office should plan for the following:
- Which participants would be better for every position in the project?
- When is the best time to start and the best time to end this project?
- What are the issues that they met before in previous projects?
- Coordinate the plan for working on many projects with the same participants with far and suitable distributing tasks.
Some of previous planning tasks is a standard task in project management but perhaps PMO control it in better way to seek improvement by using documentation from the previous projects.
Organizing and controlling projects
- The project management office should control and organize many projects at a time, especially in huge organizations, so they should lean on highly efficient organizing and control system to distribute tasks in perfect time to participations and collect reports.
- Sure, they may face many issues or some projects are going far from the plan, they should know how to control these issues and to pass every issue with intelligent solutions, especially solutions who is a guarantee that issues will not delay again the next time.
- Control the risk.
- keep risks and issues in documentation for next situations.
Reporting
- Reporting is a very important thing in project management and project management office to show success points and when it fails.
- Also, PMOs should maintain the data for inputs to keep their eyes on every choice that they can use to save time or cost or to accomplish a new target or record.
Importance of PMO
When a big organization like a massive company or government is working on many projects, they will need something to manage them all, one project manager can take care of one project to succeed in your project.
But, the Project Management Office manager can take care of many projects in time and can control these projects from one office.
Also, organizing many projects need PMO Specialists to maintain and avoid reflections in time or any other resources like tools, equipment, templates, and so on.
PMO Steps:
The steps to start a project in the project management office:
First Analyze your start status
Measuring the target and tools is an important step to start your project Also, collecting some information about stakeholders and knowing exactly where to start from to be suitable and agreed with your projects or goals.
1- Analyze your resources, tools, and employees which including (skills & experiences).
2-Find and specify the priorities of every project.
3- Stakeholders analysis.
Second Preparation and specification
Preparing your employees, tools, and the plan to start your project at this step you can prepare the software that you will use to manage data and reports or collect data or any else which will help your project to meet the best practices.
The third Step in PMO is Implementation
Now the project is started you have to follow up with employees who execute this project to make sure every task is perfect also, keep scoping for risks and try to collect every data and save risks with solutions as a report for next times and to compare solutions that you followed to use the best in future.
PMO has a few choices like traditional or agile or hybrid to choose from for the participants in the project, which one would you choose to handle your projects?
This decision leans on your report of past practices for every participant and on what you will need him again in another project.
Who is suitable for now and who is not?
PMO Benefits
PMO is targeting to provide organizations with the following:
- Integration between Strategic planning and business objectives through precise project selection, prioritization and execution
- Training, and competency development for all project practitioners
- Experience, best practices and knowledge transfer among project practitioners
- Unifying the use of software and PM tools
- Creating KPI and metrics for assessment, review, and evaluate projects
- Using a standard PM methodology, policies, procedures, templates and forms
- Provision, plan, and distribute human and non-human resources over projects
- Creating/providing Collaboration tools among project practitioners and unifying their communication language
- Project delivery on-time, within budget, and according to specified quality
- Increasing project ROI
- Provision and standardize project reports to executive board effectively and on-time
Finally, why organizations should add and care about the Project management office department?
This department is helpful if the organization is working on projects and want to get tangible values from these projects.
PMO departments can add value to your organization’s projects through their role and target to reach the benefits of the Project Management Office.
How to be a pro manager for a project management office?
Of course, to fill this position you have to obtain a degree that qualifies you.
PMO qualification is a diploma or a certificate that proves that you got and have the skills and competencies that qualify you for this position to manage the Project Management Office department.
We are in PMO Concept and are working to train you for this position and prepare your information for the exam to get certificated officially as CB-PMO® or certified based Project MO professional manager from PMO Global Institute.
PMO Global Institute is a trusted worldwide body in providing certificates in the PMO field.
And our trainer is Mr. Mahmoud Saud (official instructor and PMO consultant) who will train you for this position.
For more details don’t hesitate to contact us.