Our team can help you manage change activities better by designing, mobilising, or improving a Project, Programme, or Portfolio Management Office (PMO) to provide governance, assurance and support of delivery.
Association of Project Management (APM) research indicates '1 in 8 change initiatives fail to deliver within budget and 1 in 6 fail to deliver on time' – the problem is most executives won’t know which change initiatives these are, let alone how they are performing. Our team can help you build a PMO to fix this.
PMOs exist under many different names – project office, project support office (PSO), project controls office, programme office, portfolio office, enterprise portfolio office (EPO / EPMO), Centre of Excellence (CoE). Whatever it is called, a PMO can help to tackle the following common problems:
- not having 'one version of the truth';
- inability to compare projects on a like for like basis making it difficult to make informed investment decisions;
- lack of consistency in delivery outcomes;
- inconsistent expertise, no common language, and little clarity of roles and responsibilities;
- poor information management meaning decisions are neither implemented quickly enough, nor recorded and communicated; and
- delivery representing poor value for money and milestones frequently slipping.
Our team can help you establish a new PMO or improve your existing PMO function in a number of ways:
- governing change by defining a business rhythm to coordinate progress reporting, risk and issue management, and decision making;
- changing from “what happened” reporting to management and decision support information that uses enhanced analytical techniques to advise why current performance is like it is, what is likely to happen next based on current performance trend, and what should be done to further boost successful outcomes;
- initiating new projects and programmes in a more consistent way, making sure any new initiatives have a clear link to corporate strategy; and
- assuring change to give stakeholders confidence that projects and programmes are being managed in the right way to deliver their outcomes and benefits – either by helping your PMO to establish or improve its assurance capability, to develop an approach to integrated assurance and approval planning, or by providing additional independent assurance to provide an additional line of defence to the assurance delivered by PMO and audit committee
Contact Paul Dowell for more information about how a PMO could boost the success of your projects and programmes.