In my previous article, we talked briefly about the first phase of setting up the PMO where we understand the current state and have a high level discussion with the stake holders and senior leadership to understand what we want to achieve in the PMO and where do we want to reach.

In this article, we focus on the 2nd phase which is an important and crucial phase in building up the PMO… the Planning phase.

This is one phase that takes good amount of time and effort, as one needs to spend enough time to ensure that the plan is complete, thorough and revisited through number of iterations. If the planning is good, the execution of the PMO setup will give positive results.

The objective of this phase is to build a:

• Business Justification for the PMO
• Future plan with clear road map and key milestones.

These are the activities one must do in order for a good planning:

• Come up with a broad level plan based on the previous meetings with the stakeholders.
• Go back to the senior leadership and stakeholders with specific areas and pain points based on the previous discussions. Discussion category can include but not limited to:
  • How do we address delivery delay. Is it a discipline issue or is it to do with other factors such as lack of planning, attritions etc.?
  • How is the risk tolerance of the organization? What are the strategies to be used for risk management? Do we have a proper risk register?
  • What metrics are needed especially in the initial phases? What are the right metrics to focus on?
  • What tools are present and are needed to track project plans, and gather the right metrics?
  • What do we want to track in the dashboards?
  • What are the different level of metrics reporting and statuses needed?

• Based on the answers received, create a PMO Business case which can include, but not limited to the following:
  • Purpose for the PMO. What key problems is the PMO going to address in terms of governance, project tracking, consultancy?
  • What methodology and process are proposed or need tweaking/ improvisations?
  • What are the business needs that the PMO is going to cater to?
  • Key benefits that will be achieved by setting up the PMO, such as:
    • Project delivery on time and with quality
    • Risk assessment, call out and mitigations
    • Standard reporting of metrics and project statuses across the organization.
    • Process improvements
  •  What are the assumptions made?
  • Recommendations:
    • Goals
    • Description
    • Geography and span of control
    • Time to roll out the PMO
    • Key metrics proposed
    • Cost benefit analysis of PMO
    • Risks/constraints
• Finally create and present a PMO roll out project plan with a proper schedule, key milestones, cost involved, a baseline and a dedicated MS project or excel tracker in place.
• The PMO rollout plan is the beginning of the excitement that awaits in actually executing the PMO. But wait, do you really want to go all the nine yards of implementation yet? Not really.
• Make an internal assessment with your PMO team to see what are the quick wins in the next 100 days of PMO implementation.
• List out some quick wins in the list of the pilot projects the team will start tracking. Low hanging, rescue mission projects can be a good example to implement the PMO strategies, metrics, tracking and process evaluation to clearly call out the advantage of a PMO setup.
• At the same time, ensure that the pilot projects are a combination of easy, medium and complex projects where the span of pilot gives a good mix of results to depend on.
• Make sure that any process and tools implementation training plan is on cards for the pilot projects’ team members.