IT Success!: Towards a New Model for Information Technology

8.9. What role for PMOs?

The term PMO can stand for a number of things: project management office, programme management office, portfolio management office – even project meddling office, of which more later. The original role of PMOs, which started gaining credence at the turn of the century, was to improve project success rates. This could be achieved by either having a centralized 'best practice' group responsible for training and mentoring project managers, or by having a centralized team of 'super project managers' to run high priority initiatives. In some organizations this evolved – helped along by regulatory requirements like Sarbanes-Oxley – to include project evaluation and prioritization with a view to rationalizing the investment process and to facilitate enterprise-wide reporting.

Implementing these – fully justifiable – goals from an organizational perspective, however, sometimes proved problematic, for one or more of the following reasons:

• Difficulties in objectively defining just what constitutes project success, e.g. is it hard numbers based on a – more or less subjective – business case, or simply customer satisfaction?

• A culture clash when a PMO – by definition a central authority – is overlaid onto an organization with a decentralized culture. In extreme cases, the resulting administrative and compliance aspects can foster grievances and ultimately rejection, with the PMO viewed as a policing function (project meddling office). An example is a telco which suddenly ...