The Art and Science of PMO

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Digital business is forcing organizational leaders across many industries to evaluate how they use Project Management Offices (PMOs). PMO leaders are also reevaluating the function’s mandate and value proposition. Depending on the context and existing capabilities, establishing and leading PMOs requires six key roles that are critical to digital business transformation. The six key PMO roles are as follows:

• Investment steward

• Orchestrator

• Promoter

• Talent enabler

• Program driver

• Service provider

To gain a better perspective on these, let’s take a deeper dive…

Investment Steward

Traditionally, a PMO might help allocate investments by designing the business case proposal and review process, providing portfolio reporting and, in more mature organizations, measuring benefit realization on a project-by-project basis. Today, successful PMOs are aiming to act as an investment steward and assist the organization with conducting an analysis at the overall portfolio level. This process enables PMOs to evolve how they support enterprise investment decision making by supporting a wider variety of portfolios, business drivers and strategic imperatives. They do this by building more flexible investment processes that allow for iterative funding, changing or uncertain benefits, risks/issues, and by encouraging greater business partner ownership of these investments.

Orchestrator

As organizations shift to enterprise-scale agile and product line management, the PMO becomes more of a delivery enabler than a delivery owner. Over my experience, I have observed that delivery teams tend to struggle to meet business partners’ demands for speed while navigating complex delivery environments. In response, the strategy that works for Leigh Consulting is to help PMOs focus their growing attention on playing an orchestrator role, thus in turn enabling fast-moving and interdependent agile development teams as well as product delivery alignment, change management and general stakeholder management.

Promoter

Many leading and successful PMOs now play the role of promoter — advocating for, and enabling, digital business transformation through change. For most employees, such digital transformation efforts often mean and represent a considerable departure from their day-to-day routine. While we know that active and visible leadership support will result in a greater chance for change adoption, PMOs at progressive organizations provide these managers and leaders with training, tools, and templates to communicate change more effectively to their direct reports. The PMO in this case becomes the central coordinating body or transformation office driving the cross-enterprise rollout of digital business transformation and offering support to the resources going through that change. There are many change management practices/models to assist with the navigating change (i.e., PROSCI ADKAR model) that the PMO can use to help influence, navigate, and communicate change opportunities. Also, do not forget the power of relationship building and storytelling. These simple activities can have a significant impact as a promotor.  

Talent Enabler

The roles of resources within a PMO are evolving and to meet talent related challenges in the project management and delivery community, progressive PMO leaders play the role of talent enabler, refocusing their energies to incubate talent within project management and other delivery roles. These PMOs are reconfiguring project management roles to meet digital business requirements. The usage of the agile methodology and introduction of agile leadership roles, (i.e., scrum master and product owner) has absorbed several classic project management activities which results in PMOs creating centers of excellence and communities of practice to support a broader variety of roles beyond traditional project and program management. Our consultants at Leigh Consulting are well equipped with extensive leadership training that can help, enable and support leaders within the organizations to leverage resources to develop and attract talent, placing emphasis on emotional intelligence, communication, diversity and inclusion of thought.

Program Driver

In the emerging context of digital business, many organizations restructure delivery teams and shift from projects to products. While these teams will self-manage and deliver an increasing proportion of the organization’s work, some PMOs continue to play the program driver role, providing program management support in specific contexts, such as enterprise transformation, M&A integration or infrastructure initiatives, and high-complexity programs that cut across multiple product line portfolios. At Leigh Consulting, we offer expertise in driving small to larger programs with a proven record of implementing project/programs within budget, scope and on time.

Based on recent research, we know that the scale of cross-functional digital transformation initiatives is increasing across industries. According to a Gartner research study, 74% of CIOs report they are in either planning or the early execution stages for such initiatives. The PMO’s traditional program management capability proves especially valuable in this context, as PMOs with enterprise visibility will manage many of these cross- enterprise initiatives as traditional time-boxed programs or collections of programs that cut across numerous portfolios of work, business units, corporate functions and geographies.

Service Provider

Support stakeholders with on-demand expertise and services.

In digital business, a growing proportion of project delivery work is performed either by part-time project managers or by the delivery teams themselves, with limited project manager oversight. As a result, the PMO sees its direct oversight of end-to-end project execution greatly diminished.

While the distribution of project management responsibility can increase speed, flexibility, and customer centricity, it runs the risk of uneven business outcomes, partly because of variation in project management skills across the enterprise. Grappling with this trend, progressive PMO leaders have already begun to adjust their PMO’s mandate to act as a service provider to drive results. The services include offering stakeholders targeted support such as troubled project recovery, agile team and project manager sourcing and onboarding. 

In addition to the six PMO key roles, there are also four engagement postures to consider.

Four PMO engagement postures for Leigh Consulting’s Portfolio, Program and Project Managers:

• Executing: Are business partners’ needs best met if we provide the majority of the delivery activities?

• Coaching: Do business partners lack project management expertise that we can help develop over time through coaching and/or training?

• Consulting: Do business partners need advice or guidance to achieve desired portfolio/program/project outcomes?

• Brokering: Do business partners need help orchestrating support or ensuring consistent service performance from a third party, whether internal or external?

In conclusion, leading PMOs today support the enterprise by playing a combination of six key roles: investment steward, orchestrator, promoter, talent enabler, program driver and service provider. These six broad roles are critical for PMOs to play to support digital business transformation and you will find them at the heart of the PMO services we provide at Leigh Consulting. In donning a combination of these hats, leading PMOs have discovered an added benefit: an improved ability to articulate their PMO’s value proposition to their most important stakeholders.

Dr. Ralph B. Manyara

Head of Leigh Consulting - PMO and Cybersecurity services