To sum it up, they are strategically aligned, a vital part of the planning team, embrace core competencies, and show consistency in the project execution and yet flexible in their approach to managing change.So, the PMO have following key areas to focus on:
Having a clear strategic vision
Staying consistent in delivery practices
Flexibility to align to the changing business goals
Playing an active role in overall ownership
The road to achieve success for the organisational success is to have visibility at the top level. The PMO would have a say in critical business decisions and work closely with CxO’s and VP’s.
So, a right approach is what helps in ensuring that this happens. And to achieve this, the key ingredient is to work on the fundamentals and ensure that the basic things are as a matter of fact working.
1) Keep it simple: Simplicity removes the room for different interpretations and gets everyone on the same page, especially when one is working in a global environment across culturally different teams. So, the PMO’s focus on using standard metrics and processes. This sounds simple but the real challenge lies in internalizing it and implementing it across the organisation and making it work.
2) Focus: The PMO’s ensure that the processes and metrics defined are aligned to the strategic goals of the organisation. This ensures all stakeholders across all teams believe and rely on the processes and metrics.
3) Action, Action and Action: This is the main result and outcome, else all the strategy, planning and concepts are futile. All processes and KPIs are in-vain if they do not result in actions. As an example, increase in revenue is directly proportional to the operational excellence. And successful PMO’s aspire to track KPI’s that help relate to this.
4) Measuring PMO value: This is subjective and depends a lot on the maturity of the organisation and the PMO model itself. But if implemented correctly, can help in measuring the return on investment (ROI) of the PMO team itself.
The KPI’s that the PMO can focus on is shown schematically in the diagram below:
