Roles of PMO organisations

A Project Management Office (PMO) is not an uncommon feature of middle to larger insurance organisations. The PMO is often associated with primarily IT projects, perhaps because of a history of poor execution on the part of IT, or due to the significant size of the a programme that the business intends to complete. In other situations, the PMO will be spread across both business and IT - for example to establish a Shared Services function. In any of these situations, the nature of the PMO tends to be either to coordinate and report, or to take full ownership of driving the change programme. Which is better? It depends - on the stakeholders both within and outside of the PMO team.

The Coordinating PMO
The coordination model has PMO collecting status information from individual project managers, and creating management reports.

In order to do this effectively the PMO will normally implement some level of standards (templates, procedures) that make their life easier by ensuring consistent information.

PMO will gather information from each individual project manager, maintain centralised folders or repositories of plans, reports, milestone charts, and issues lists.

However the PMO will not normally be proactive in taking decisions about individual projects, instead escalating to stakeholders.

Business case preparation is usually left to the stakeholders or staff outside of PMO. In fact the PMO staff will often lack a good understanding of the business domain.

In one example organisation, the PMO team did not have any staff with any significant level of understanding of Financial Services, or IT. As a result they were unable to contribute to creation of business cases, not knowing what needed to be considered or how the project would benefit the business. The PMO function became a convenience for the rest of the business - a team that would write the status reports, manage the files, and other project administration tasks.

The Directing PMO

In a directing model, PMO has a much higher level of accountability for delivery of the programme results. The objectives of the PMO are defined in terms of the business benefits, and responsibility is shared with the business leaders. The PMO leader (Programme Director?) takes a much more active role in the change programme. He/she sets strategies, timelines, and pushes responsibilities onto the business members.

Which is Best?
If the business is characterised by strong leadership, then PMO will naturally play a more supportive role, taking away much of the administration while the business owner retains control of the direction of the programme.

If the business team does not have strong leadership, then PMO has the option and probably the responsibility to step into the vacuum to drive the direction and exection of the programme.