Over the last 15 years I have built and matured PMO and project management teams for the JPMorgan Private Bank, Chase Bank, DaVita Healthcare Partners, and Charles Schwab. My vision for PMO capabilities includes alignment to strategic roadmaps, intake, portfolio management, PMO, PDLC, and SDLC process standards, program/project execution across application development, infrastructure, data, regulatory, and M&A initiatives, resource management and forecasting, financial accountability, risk management, governance, and operations.

In modern delivery practices, the PMO is often more than a Project Management Office. Current delivery models extend well beyond project management and PMO leadership is increasingly about multiple portfolios of work including project and non-project practices that build software solutions that deliver business outcomes. A modern Portfolio Management Office embraces delivery practices that include traditional project management functions as well as agile and scaled agile frameworks.

Executing robust Project or Portfolio Management Office (PMO) capabilities involves much more than just organizing Project Managers who deliver IT initiatives. Successful solution delivery does not happen without planned and intentional consideration of competing priorities and the limited capacity to deliver against an always growing set of business needs. Project execution and the delivery of business outcomes through agile practices should consider standards that drive progress across delivery lanes and checks to ensure consistent use of delivery standards to create high quality solutions and promote transparency and disciplined practices. The PMO is also accountable for the data and tools used to tell the story of the portfolio to project teams, sponsors, executives, and other portfolio stakeholders.

Finally, the approach to PMO and project management practices has to fit the overall organizational operating model. The PMO and project management function will show up differently for a traditional command and control or waterfall style approach than a scaled agile enterprise with a strong product orientation.

The Value of Project Management

One key function of a PMO Leader is to have a vision of the value of project management. I believe project management practices create the structure and discipline that enable product outcomes in both a traditional waterfall environment or a product oriented scaled agile enterprise. Project managers facilitate the successful delivery of business outcomes by navigating the complexities of enterprise processes and orchestrate across the organization to manage dependencies and connect teams with a shared vision of success.

Portfolio and project management practices enable product outcomes.

Guiding Principles

The following “Guiding Principles” shape portfolio and project management practices and enable the delivery of business outcomes -

• Clearly Defined Roles & Responsibilities
  Everyone involved must have a clear understanding our their role and importance to the success of the initiative. Set expectation early and reinforce those expectations over the life of the effort.

• Engaged and Committed Stakeholders
  The success of any initiative is often dependent on multiple teams. It is critical to identify and ensure the availability and commitment of all teams needed to fully delivery the scope of work.

• Operational and Financial Discipline
  Program/project delivery is often complicated and difficult. Success requires organization and consistency to manage the work, identify and mitigate/resolve risks and issues, keep everyone informed, and deliver outcomes in the timeframe and budget available.

• Full Transparency
  The progress and health of the effort must be made visible to sponsors, governance processes, and interested stakeholders. Honest and timely information is key to making needed tradeoff decisions, mitigating risks, and resolving issues. Asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness.

• Continuous Improvement
  Periodic review of what is going well and identifying pain points is important to make in-progress adjustments and adapt delivery practices to improve delivery success. Growth and maturity only happens if we ask what we would have done differently if we knew then what we know now.

PMO Services
PMO capabilities includes these "Pillars" of end-to-end PMO services - 

• Intake & Governance
  The PMO team is often responsible for partnering with technology and business leadership to identify business needs as new project ideas. These ideas must be scoped, estimated, assessed, and prioritized against other ideas competing for consideration. It is important to ensure that potential ideas are aligned to business roadmaps, have a sound business case justifying the work, and that the business prioritizes new project requests so that the ideas that best drive business value are approved for work.

  Initiatives that are approved by the business must then be slotted to start based on technology resource capacity and business priority. The PMO is often responsible for throttling the volume of incoming demand so that the IT organization is not overwhelmed by new incoming requests. Prioritization based on the value and urgency of the work enables sound decision making and tradeoff decisions.
   

• Project Management Standards & Guidelines
  In order to ensure consistent delivery practices, the PMO should provide guidance for project execution grounded in PMI PMBOK standards and industry standard delivery practices. Depending on the maturity and goals of technology and business leaders, these standards may include a more traditional Waterfall methodology or use an Agile delivery approach. Consideration must be given for Application Development, BI/Data Analytics, or Infrastructure projects as the approach for delivering initiatives in each area must match the nature of the work.

  Once standards and guidelines for project execution have been established and communicated, a continuous improvement function must be created providing feedback loops to identify opportunities to improve delivery capabilities.
   

• Project Execution
  The PMO is typically accountable for the Portfolio and Project Management function and staffing to deliver business outcomes. While the project managers can be aligned directly to the PMO or can be matrixed in as part of a decentralized organization, the PMO is typically viewed as accountable for portfolio and project management practices and delivery excellence.

  It is my belief that the project manager's role is more than just task management. I expect the project manager to truly play a leadership role with the project team. The project manager should organize the work and partner with the project team members and the project sponsor to facilitate the delivery of the project by acting as the voice of the project. The PM is expected to establish expectations, manage scope and project risk, facilitate issue resolution, track financials, manage vendors, communicate delivery health, remove roadblocks, and escalate when help is needed.

  In an agile organization the role of the project manager role may look very different. The product owner is often the voice of the initiative, bringing requirements in the form of user stories directly to the scrum team for development, testing, and production deployment. In agile, the PM may be less directly involved in managing tasks in the software development process.

  In larger, more complex, or heavily regulated industries, the project manager plays an essential role enabling solution delivery by navigating complex enterprise processes, managing finance and accounting practices (capitalization, accruals, reclasses), engaging vendors, working with legal, involving 2nd Line of Defense risk partners, interacting with 3rd Line of Defense audit teams, and managing stakeholder communication. The PM is able to facilitate numerous aspects of solution delivery, protecting the product owner and scum teams from the noise and distraction of these complex corporate processes allowing the development team to focus on the details of software development, release management, and adoption.
   

• Risks and Controls

  Project execution functions best with a strong risk management mindset. I believe that identifying and managing risk is a foundational aspect of project management. This includes standard risk identification, mitigation, issue management, and resolution practices.

  This risk mindset extends beyond traditional project management activities to include the engagement of organizational risk partners for review and challenge oversight, the development of controls to drive the mitigation of organizational and process risk, establishing KRIs to evaluate portfolio performance, and internal audit testing to confirm the effectiveness of established standards.

• PMO Operations

  In order to enable all aspects of PMO services, the PMO Operations team is responsible for tools administration, data management , dashboards, status updates, and financial reporting. PMO Operations sometimes is also accountable for related services such as time tracking, resource forecasting, and exception reporting.

  The Operations team allows the PMO to tell the story of the portfolio by creating information from portfolio and resource data. They tell the story of the work though the output from tools and the reports that are consumed by project teams, project sponsors, resource managers, IT leadership, and business executives enabling the decision making and tradeoffs necessary to drive success.