PMO

Current research indicates that more than 50% of PMOs close down as quickly as they are initiated.

They fail to deliver the expected value and are seen as an unnecessary cost overhead by organizations, especially in today’s challenging business and economic environment. In several IT organizations, my direct experience has been that the CIO is getting increasing caught in a tight balancing act between operational and strategic responsibilities. Conflicts arise out of a dual focus on administrative and informational oversight of project investment and performance, and on justifying the PMO investments and the time it takes to deliver value. The question I find each CIO really asking is – how do I get my PMO to create significant and demonstrable business value, and fast?

There is considerable discussion today about what building an effective PMO is about – managing projects, programs or portfolios? (Download a White Paper on this subject). A general thread I see running through IT organizations that have been effective in achieving great results in this area is that their PMOs are invariably focused on Portfolio Management.

While designing PM performance metrics and dashboards is important, I believe that a focus on Portfolio Management drives home the need to understand the decision-making mechanism, which helps in creating governance and assurance processes, backed by relevant and timely information. This critically ensures that IT is directly aligned to business objectives.

An effective IT PMO can deliver breakthrough results in most PM areas including increased throughput, speed & reliability, significant reduction in resource burn-out, higher productivity, leading to high benefit/ cost ratios for IT investments.

In one ongoing engagement, where i2m operates as a PMO Managed Services Provider for a large financial services organization, we have been able to support the IT team, to achieve near 100% improvement in project throughput, speed, visibility and reliability, a 5-fold increase in number of projects completing in time, an increase in objective project selection to 75%, and an IT cost to benefit ratio of 1:20. (See related Case Video and or download the Case Study).

We invite CIOs, Project Managers and others working in this area, to share similar or differing experiences.