205.0 Process Overview

PMOStep contains a model to help establish a Project Management Office (PMO). The general model is as follows.

210.0 PMO Foundation

The foundation of the PMO is identified first. This includes understanding the organizational scope of the PMO, the sponsor, the customers and other fundamental aspects of the organization. These basic questions must be answered before you can proceed. For example, it is hard to initiate and plan the work of the PMO if you don’t know who your customers and stakeholders are. You are also not going to be able to plan the PMO deployment work if you don’t understand the organizational scope of the PMO. These basic decisions need to be made first. Much of this information needs to be defined first, while some of the information may be uncovered in the Initiation and Planning phases.

You must also recognize that the work of the PMO will result in changes to the way people work. This will require you to structure your work as a culture change initiative. This will require a holistic approach taking many aspects of organizational behavior into account.

220.0 PMO Initiation

In this phase, we establish the organizational context for the major responsibilities of the PMO. This is accomplished by understanding the current nature of the “project world”. This is a wide ranging discovery to gain a well-rounded view of the organization and its relationship to projects. The organization than defines what the future state should look like. The current state and future state are compared to determine the gaps.

230.0 PMO Planning

There are hundreds of ways to build a PMO. The specific nature of your PMO is defined by identifying the products and services that are required to help move your organization from its current state toward the more desired future state.

The most important information from the Initiation step is the Gap Analysis. This is not one gap, but a series of gaps for each element that was considered within in the current state and future state discussion. The PMO needs to determine what products and services it can offer to its customers and stakeholders to close the gaps. For instance, if your project managers do not have good project management skills, the PMO may offer training services to help close the skill gap.

This section describes how the Gap Analysis is converted to PMO products and services. The products and services are deployed to the organization based on a Deployment Plan, and the subset of the plan called the PMO Roadmap. 

240.0 PMO Deployment Example

This section describes how you execute the PMO Roadmap (part of the PM Deployment Plan) through a series of waves (or phases). The organization can only absorb so much change at one time. This will require you to deploy in waves (phases). This requires you to have a long-term deployment plan that is built understanding priorities, the pace of change, and the relative resource requirements.

280.0 PMO Products and Services

All PMOs are different but there is a set of products and services that would be common for a PMO to consider. For instance, most PMOs are responsible for the project management methodology. This is considered a tangible product. PMOs typically are responsible for providing project management training. This would be considered a service.

This section describes many of the common products and services that are offered by PMOs, as well as many areas that PMOs are responsible for that would be considered more advanced. 

290.0 Miscellaneous

This section contains additional information such as common PMO problems, best practices, PMO roles and other information to make the definition and deployment of the PMO as smooth as possible.