PMO Structure: A Systematic Review

Project management offices have exploded in popularity over the last decade. In these exciting times where businesses across the spectrum are undergoing transformations, re-inventing, and optimizing product offerings, the agility of PMO is an important contributor to the organization’s business agility. Project management practices can help achieve strategic goals and increase the value of projects in organizations.

That is, this role is an integral part of the success and health of an organization and its projects.

The main purpose of this series of articles is to present a review of PMO itself and how do PMO processes work at DevCom.

In this, we’ll dive into what a project management office does, the structure of PMO, and PMO’s main principles.

What Does PMO Mean?

PMO is a term you may often hear when talking about project management. Let us begin with the definition and the distinction from the Project Office etc.

A Project Management Office (PMO) is a department within an organization that standardizes and documents the best project management techniques. The PMO sets the project scope, trains staff, and tracks the metrics for all processes. PMOs use metrics to optimize processes and ensure each project is aimed at the organization’s objectives and goals.

The Project Management Office (PMO) at Devcom represents a management division that standardizes project-related governance processes, facilitates sharing of resources, tools, and existing techniques, methodologies, and develops custom approaches with subsequent tailoring.

Devcom’s PMO main mission is to create an environment of sustainable high performance of projects and their continuous improvement.

Structure

A project management office acts as a backbone of successful project management. The current hierarchy supports a flat structure type with the principal on top:

Director of PMO ↓

Project Managers — Project Coordinators — Project Administrators — Business Analysts

The Project Manager is the person assigned by the performing organization to lead the team responsible for achieving the project objectives. PM provides the project team with leadership, planning, and coordination through communications.

A Project Coordinator is a professional who helps a company with administrative tasks for specific projects and makes sure that everything is running smoothly so that the project manager can achieve the company’s goals.

The Project Manager (PM) and Project Coordinator (PC) are successful when the project objectives have been achieved. Another aspect of success is stakeholder satisfaction, including needs, concerns, and expectations. To be successful, PM/PC should tailor the project approach, life cycle, and project management processes to meet the project and product requirements.

Good Project Managers might have more than one project coordinator to take care of all the tasks involved with scheduling, budgeting, and task creation. Due to the seniority of the role and the more responsibilities it entails, the Project Manager should have strong leadership skills.

Project Coordinators complete duties like these to give project managers the time to handle bigger issues.

PMO Core Principles

The main objective of a Project Management Office is to define frameworks, templates, and principles that help establish an organization-wide standard approach to projects and project deliveries.

Here are some crucial principles that work as the building blocks of a strong Project Management Office:

• Provide project management guidelines that support consistency in how projects are delivered

This principle is supported by the variety of policies related to project management processes, templates, and training during the onboarding and throughout the career path. Our standardized tools, approaches, and knowledge nourish a common high-fidelity vision across projects and facilitate decisions that transcend individual project concerns.

• Offer project support with shared services to successfully combine the development approach and life cycle

PMO exists as a supportive unit that wants to ensure fine delivery while maintaining direct control over some project phases and particular activities (planning, risk management, performance tracking, delivery).

• Be the second pair of eyes to oversee the company’s projects

Oversight includes activities to follow the project status from the first day. The monitoring may occur in the presale phase, where business case requirements are needed to initiate a project, resource allocation to execute and deliver the project, and change requests approval to align project objectives.

• Serve as the center of growth, knowledge, compliance, and competence

The PMO goals in perspective focus on:

• sharing lessons learned from retrospectives across the unit(s) to transfer valuable knowledge regularly;
• playing a proactive role in nurturing and retaining talented team members while developing management and leadership skills within project teams and across the company;
• coaching development teams, building agile skills and capabilities throughout the Devcom to support customer-centered objectives, and apply adaptive delivery for business initiatives;
• mentoring Clients (e.g., product owners) to be more effective in their roles and actively participate in creating value while executing their main responsibilities;
• implementing Devcom’s strategy with investments in projects that deliver specific outcomes as part of its IT expertise.

We strongly believe that these activities strengthen project delivery.

PMO As Shared Service

PMO serves Devcom in multiple ways based on the core PMO principles.Activities are as follows but are not limited to:

• process assistance;
• general or specific consulting;
• service requests;
• presale activities;
• educational activities.

Ground Rules and Code of Conduct

1. PMO members treat each other with respect at all times.
2. Each member accepts the responsibilities and is accountable for their actions.
3. PMO strives to work collaboratively and uses a consensus approach when making team decisions.
4. Constructive feedback is a valuable part of our success, so we will not take offense, and all PMO members will ensure all feedback is provided in a constructive manner.
5. PMO recognizes and celebrates all individual and team accomplishments.
6. Project scoresheets will be processed monthly by the end of the second week next month.
7. All personal stuff is left aside before beginning any meetings or discussions to keep better focus.
8. He who is late more than 3 minutes or absent to the PMO biweekly meeting without prior notification has to prepare a presentation for internal knowledge sharing or Devcom Talk.
9. We will give consideration to whoever is speaking and avoid sidebars or speaking over one another.

Why is project management important?

A successful PMO ensures your company is working on the right things by prioritizing work based on corporate strategy. It also enables the transparency of important data including employing capacity and availability. This ensures the right projects are implemented within budget without overburdening employees.

Final Thoughts

In enterprise-sized organizations, it is the department that improves project management by standardizing processes and improving efficiency.PMOs create and maintain project documentation and best practices, track metrics, and offer training.

The primary task of a PMO is to establish standard processes. You need them to eliminate regularly occurring issues.

When a group or team identifies and solves a problem, they can document the steps followed and share them with others. In the future, if another team member encounters the same problem, all they need to do is follow the pre-established steps and the problem will be solved.

Through every stage of the product life cycle, DevCom is a brain-trust dedicated to forward-thinking. Contact us.