In the first blog of our PMO series we looked at the evolution of PMOs away from a traditional governance and reporting model to a more business-focused approach where the PMO is helping to enable strategic execution excellence. In combination with strategic portfolio management (SPM) principles and word class tools like ServiceNow’s SPM solution, this is helping PMOs to drive improvements in project delivery environments that are directly benefitting the bottom line.
However, that's not enough as PMOs cannot simply be passive functions, acting only in response to upstream guidance and direction. They must be strategic partners for the rest of the organization, creating value for the business. This is the evolution from a value-driven PMO to a value-driving PMO and it is going to become increasingly important over the next few years.
To understand the difference, consider resource management as an example. In a value-driven environment, PMOs look to improve resource management by increasing overall utilization rates, reducing variances between planned and actual allocations, smoothing out peaks and troughs in demand to reduce bottlenecks and increase employee engagement, and generally strengthen resource management practices and approaches. These elements combine to improve the capacity to deliver work and, if done well, improve motivation and productivity while reducing resource and resource owner frustrations.
In order to move to the next level and become value-driving, PMOs must think beyond these more immediate resource management improvements. They must consider the trends in resource capacity and capability demand – analyzing strategic roadmaps and considering the impacts on resource requirements. They must then work with HR, learning and development, procurement and related professionals to ensure that the pool of available resources will have the right mix of skills and experiences to deliver on those emerging needs.
Value-driving PMOs can also contribute to strategic success by embracing new work approaches, empowering and supporting delivery teams to deliver innovative work in innovative ways. They can contribute to strategic planning and modeling with creative ways to schedule and manage work to minimize time to solution and optimize throughput. PMOs can also leverage analytics to provide early warnings when solutions are beginning to show variances from expected benefits, which allows for faster responses and smaller shortfalls, driving improvements directly to the bottom line.
Achieving this level of excellence requires skilled PMO professionals, but what many fail to realize is that most organizations already have those. What most organizations don’t have is the data necessary to produce the information that PMOs must consume to become value-driving. They also usually don’t have the tools to turn that information into insight, providing context and interpretation that supports effective and efficient decision making.
This is where ServiceNow customers are at a distinct advantage. With all of the solutions benefitting from the Now platform, PMOs using the ServiceNow SPM solution not only have access to accurate, complete, real-time data on the performance of work being carried out in waterfall, Agile and hybrid project environments. And they don’t just have access to the real-time strategic roadmaps that executives are leveraging through continuous and adaptive planning.
These customers also have the ability to see all of that information in the context of all other happenings across the enterprise. This is an essential component as resourcing for discretionary investments doesn’t happen in isolation – it must consider impacts on operations and support. New work methods can’t be introduced without the ability to integrate those approaches into a well-established operating environment, and variances can’t be identified without visibility into that operating environment. ServiceNow customers have that, and their PMOs are far more capable of being value-driving.
