Historically, project management offices, or PMOs, have spent a lot of time looking in the rear view mirror. They have concentrated on providing consolidated reporting about what has happened in the last period for the projects under their supervision, they have enforced process compliance and addressed other governance activities associated with project execution. These are important activities, but just like driving a car, if you only look backwards, there are going to be problems.
That’s why there has been an increasing trend in recent years to reimagine PMOs as forward looking, value focused bodies. They are being recognized as essential enablers in portfolio delivery, helping organizations to align work with strategy, improving overall capacity through improved resource management, and helping with communication across all stakeholders in portfolio delivery. With the increasing focus on strategic portfolio management, or SPM, this is becoming even more critical.
In an SPM environment, success comes from the ability to continuously align strategies, investments, work and benefits – even as those items evolve and shift with emerging threats and opportunities. That requires organizational agility – the ability of a business to quickly adapt and adjust with minimal disruption. That’s where PMOs must play an essential role. They must ensure that all of the key aspects of organizational agility are optimized:
- Exceptional communication between all elements of portfolio delivery
- Empowered teams capable of driving changes to their work to maintain strategic alignment
- Data driven, enterprise-wide decision making across all delivery approaches – waterfall, Agile and hybrid
- Optimized alignment between delivery and benefits at all times
- Minimally disruptive change whenever needed
- Support for continuously adaptive planning
Achieving that takes more than a shift in attitude towards what a PMO is and how it should operate, although that change in perception must also occur. It requires the right technology infrastructure – not just project management software, or even legacy project portfolio management solutions. Rather, it requires an SPM tool that is capable of directly linking delivery with strategy, of integrating work across all delivery methods, and of quickly and intuitively planning, modeling and communicating proposed changes.
With ServiceNow, not only do PMOs get access to those capabilities, they also benefit from the Now platform, providing visibility and insight into everything that is happening across the organization. This finally allows PMOs to become better integrated with other areas of the business – operations, support, infrastructure and so on. And that provides a springboard for PMOs to move beyond simply value driven functions and evolve into value driving functions. We’ll consider what that means in the next blog post.
