The People Management Office, v2022

What's new with the Project Management Office? Well, in my last blog (check it out on the PM Solutions site here), I theorized that one reason PMOs have become a standard feature of organizations, with the value they provide rarely questioned, is that they have brought the essential people management tasks related to project success in-house. Today's PMOs develop job descriptions for project work, hire, train, mentor, reward and oversee project managers. Why is this so important?

PMOs in the past have tried to manage without authority across the silos of the organization, and to the extent that their leaders could wield expert power and promote a project management culture, they had some success. But it should be obvious that this approach to successful projects is fraught with a lot of grey areas. Some functional areas had managers who were delighted to cooperate with the PMO; some did not. Some project managers in the matrixed organization saw the benefit in using the methodology and templates suggested; some resisted change.  From the PMO's point of view, it was hard to draw a straight line between PMO efforts and business outcomes.

Our new research study, The State of the PMO 2022, tells us that today's PMOs are more likely to have centralized the management of projects, and the care and feeding of project managers, within the PMO. Not only that, but this is one of the practices of high-performing PMOs. Another top practice of high performers? Training. Training more often, on more topics, and reaching out to train more people across the organization. In fact, a robust training program is a hallmark of high performing organizations, not only in this study, but in every study we have done in years past.

More on managing people within the PMO from J. Kent Crawford here.