Have you ever found yourself wondering if there is a more efficient project lifecycle that your team or organization could take to increase productivity – but don’t have the capacity to increase resource numbers or internal training to accommodate for a fully functioning Project Management Office (PMO)? PMO on Demand services are increasing in demand and effectiveness throughout all industries, as organizations move into the digital age.
The concept – the ability to organise a functioning PMO within any company, in any capacity, without the need to bring new staff into the payroll, rather open the company up to consultants to focus on the tasks at hand. PMO on demand services are also aimed at uplifting pre-established PMO, bringing a whole new capability to any organization.
One of the stand out PMO on Demand companies that we have had the pleasure of working alongside is ‘PMOHQ’, a well developed, highly effective team of project managers, who have worked at iconic organizations including VicRoads, AusNet Services, and Ambulance Victoria – where the deployed team was able to assess, build and implement a variety of Project Management practices including PMO guideline creation and deployment, Successful completion of projects in execution, as well as PMO advisory services – keeping the PMOHQ legacy alive in each assignment.
PMOHQ utilizes two of the worlds most trusted project management softwares, and covers multiple disciplines when it comes to project management, while being able to build complex and effective solutions to project management problems by mixing components from PRINCE2, Agile, and other methodologies.
Oracle’s PPM Cloud provides an enterprise-grade PPM solution which is tightly integrated with financial management, procurement, HCM and other Oracle solutions to standardize data, rules and processes across your enterprise for accounting, intercompany, project costing, billing, revenue and contracts, providing the control necessary to ensure complete project visibility and global, scalable project financial management. A true single source of project truth!
Complete and integrated project financial management means that project-centric businesses can stay informed and in control. Simplified project planning, budgeting and forecasting lets you streamline project financial planning processes, and standardized cost capture across the enterprise lets you cut administrative effort and get timely visibility into validated project expenditure
The other, PMOHQ’s own PPM tool – a smaller, Australian made and managed software, designed and operated by project managers looking for a better solution to the widely used MS Project. PMOHQ offers the user a unique PPM tool that provides a single source of truth and is capable of catering for all project management needs, from one single web app.
Through simple configuration, PMOHQ is able to produce greater levels of project, program, and portfolio governance, while also having the flexibility to map directly to a majority of existing projects, with an easy import process. Of course, as project managers we are looking to adhere to those norms that a project should run with, whether that is comparable graphing for divisional reporting purposes, or generating information for weekly/monthly/adhoc meetings.
So why do so many internal PMOs fail? The understanding of the power that a PMO can bring to a project centric business is often not realized by high level business leaders, and are usually not shown executive level support. With lack of executive support, PMOs often don’t have the buy-in from the organization. This can be due to many factors, culminated from high level management, where there is a reluctance to a change in business practices, a gap in understanding around the vision, mission and objectives around the PMO, or that establishing a PMO does not alight with the corporate strategy. What businesses fail to realize is that close to 90% of large scale, high performing organizations have a well established PMO, and that 77% of PMOs are directly involved in strategic planning activities. Most importantly, 87% of PMOs are focused on aligning projects with the businesses objectives. So the decision is clear cut – the figures around the PMO performance are more in the favour of business progress, although it will involve change, a PMO will continue to be the most valuable player that an organization.
Whether you’re a first-time buyer into a PMO or a seasoned veteran, your business challenges are similar: You need a solution that will help you do better work faster. With a high-performing PMO, projects become easier to manage and thereby easier to execute. Before considering implementation or a transformation, it’s important to ask yourself the hard questions about necessity and readiness. Make sure everyone understands what is trying to be accomplished and figure out how to garner the support you need for PMO success.