Top 10 Habits of Highly Eecve PMOs

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877.965.9501 www.meer.com

Table of Contents
Execuve Summary The Top 10 Habits of Highly Eecve PMOs 1. Implement an Objecve Project Selecon Process 2. Develop Robust Guidelines 3. Build a Process Framework 4. Measure Project Performance 5. Use a Project Porolio Management and Reporng Tool 6. Employ a PMO Help Desk 7. Oer Training to Project Teams 8. Manage Stakeholder Communicaon 9. Conduct Project Audits 10. Create a PMO Roadmap Conclusion 3 4 4 4 5 6 6 7 7 8 8 9 10

Top 10 Habits of Highly Eecve PMOs

Execuve Summary
Eecve project management oces (PMOs) ulize project management best pracces, employ repeatable processes, and are recognized for the tangible improvements in project performance they provide to their organizaons. There is an abundance of informaon available describing the compeve benets of starng a PMO. Some of the most frequently cited benets include decreased project failure rates, improved alignment with strategic goals, and improved capability to meet cost, schedule, scope, and resource objecves. If these sound like benets you would like to realize in your enterprise, youre not alone. According to a recent survey of execuves conducted by CIO Magazine and the Project Management Instute (PMI), 76 percent reported that they had created a PMO in the past 3 years, and the longer the PMO had been in operaon, the more project success rates improved. You can achieve these benets by making sure your PMO delivers real value. The ten habits outlined below will make your PMO more eecve, and maximize its benet to your organizaon: 1. Implement an Objecve Project Selecon Process 2. Develop Robust Guidelines 3. Build a Process Framework 4. Measure Project Performance 5. Use a Project Porolio Management and Reporng Tool 6. Employ a PMO Help Desk 7. Oer Training to Project Teams 8. Management Stakeholder Communicaon 9. Conduct Project Audits 10. Create a PMO Roadmap

If implemenng all of these habits seems daunng, consider outsourcing porons of your PMO. There are innovave and cost eecve soluons that can have a dramac impact on the eecveness of a PMO. Packaged with PMI cered analysts, deep subject maer knowledge, and project tools, Mers PMO Central delivers a virtual help desk, learning center, reference center and PMO reporng. It is a cost eecve PMO soluon that combines virtual PMO services with PPM CentralTM, Mers project porolio management (PPM) soware. This oers a seamless integraon of project support, subject maer experse, and project performance analysis to empower you to execute projects successfully, improve process maturity, and opmize your PMO.

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Top 10 Habits of Highly Eecve PMOs

The Top 10 Habits of Highly Eecve PMOs

If you have already established a PMO for your organizaon, targeng improvements in project success rates and process standardizaon, then you are in good company. According to a CIO execuve survey, 66 percent of high performing organizaons have already established a PMO to capture these benets. However, operang your PMO eecvely and eciently requires talented resources, solid process and enabling project tools.

Today, there are many choices for PMO guidance and support. Organizaons without budget challenges may choose to stand up a full PMO in house or hire tradional consultants. Organizaons with the desire or mandate to opmize resources and cut costs may choose to outsource these funcons and implement a virtual PMO. Whichever opon you choose, your PMO needs a blueprint for success. Keep these ten habits in mind as you iniate or evolve your PMO, and youll be on your way to tapping the real compeve advantage that an eecve PMO can provide.

According to a CIO execuve survey, 66 percent of high performing organizaons have already established a PMO to capture these benets.

1. Implement an Objecve Project Selecon Process

Eecve PMOs recognize that only an objecve, well dened project qualicaon process provides the ability to compare and evaluate incoming project requests. This intake process should assess each request to determine project suitability and priority based on pre-dened, well understood scoring criteria. Scoring should assess project viability in areas such as life cycle costs, resource requirements, compability, and most importantly, strategic alignment. The PMO should strive to measure project value based on alignment to strategic goals and objecves and to also select those projects that have the highest value scores. Using a project qualicaon process consistently enables the PMO to priorize requests, and provide balanced recommendaons to senior management. Without a project qualicaon process, a PMO loses the ability to idenfy projects that will consume resources without providing the needed benet to the organizaon. Mers PMO Central ulizes a standard business case framework to help PMOs inventory and priorize project requests. Scoring criteria can be dened by you, or you can use the standard PPM Central scoring criteria. Our analysts synthesize your data and produce mulple scenarios in a concise format for your planning and analysis. This allows you to execute the right projects at the right me.

2. Develop Robust Guidelines

Guidelines make use of project management best pracces. They should be used as a governance tool, to

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Top 10 Habits of Highly Eecve PMOs set expectaons within the organizaon about what is required of projects and project managers. However, guidelines are more than just a way to set policy for the organizaon. When embraced by the organizaon, they become an integral part of the project managers toolkit in two important ways. First, it makes it faster and easier for them to build high-quality plans. And second, it makes it easier for them to re-purpose similar deliverables or plans produced elsewhere in the organizaon. This improves their eciency, and strengthens the project management culture in the organizaon. By giving project managers these guidelines up front, the PMO is seng up the project manager and the organizaon for success.

The most eecve guidelines are living documents reviewed and updated regularly to evolve and mature over me.

Creang guidelines does not have to be a dicult task for a PMO. Start by documenng all of the unocial project policies that exist within the organizaon. Most organizaons have implied guidelines that projects should adhere to but are not formally documented. Next, research and implement guidelines based on industry best pracces. Tailor these guidelines based on factors such as project type, size, and complexity. Make the guidelines exible enough so that project managers have the ability to declare excepons and seek approval for deviaon from the standard when circumstances warrant. The most eecve guidelines are living documents reviewed and updated regularly to evolve and mature over me. Finally, consider that even the most complete guidelines are not valuable if theyre not easily accessible and well communicated to the people who need them. This is one of the reasons that Mers PMO Central includes an enre library of standard guidelines and best pracces for project managers. Project managers can type search terms in PPM Central and receive the relevant materials without going to a dierent applicaon or learning a new interface.

3. Build a Process Framework

A process framework provides PMOs with consistent standards across all projects within an organizaon. Standardizaon of project processes augments exisng PMO guidelines, and completes the PMO project process framework. Process standardizaon serves many benets, including: consistency in project execuon a basis for expected performance Standards should be applicable to all projects, regardless of scope, cost, and schedule. Projects should be expected to parcipate in standard processes and produce output consistent with expectaons. To make the process even more transparent to project teams, workows can be used to automate the process.

Copyright 2011. Mer, Ltd. All Rights Reserved

Top 10 Habits of Highly Eecve PMOs Nocaons and detailed descripons of the process steps will make adopon of the processes much faster and easier for project teams. Mers PMO Central analysts can work with you to improve your current process standards as well as parcipate in the execuon of your standards, serving as your subject maer expert. Mers PMO Central oers an online reference center with topic area analysis on PPM and a fully-loaded training center with curricula designed with standardized industry best-pracces in mind. It also oers process automaon tools and techniques that will ensure your PMO processes are repeatable, consistent and communicated.

One of the key value-added funcons of a PMO is its ability to idenfy struggling projects early, and assist with correcve acons before those projects degrade any further.

4. Measure Project Performance

Weve all heard What cant be measured, cant be managed, and its absolutely true for projects. One of the key value-added funcons of a PMO is its ability to idenfy struggling projects early, and assist with correcve acons before those projects degrade any further. As a result, eecve PMOs establish standard performance measures across all projects and monitor those metrics regularly. Regardless of the parcular performance measures that may be relevant for your business, the rst step is to create a baseline that the project will be measured against. Common performance measures like cost performance, schedule performance, and risk posture may be well understood and easily quaned. Others, like customer sasfacon, are just as important to measure, but may require the invenon of an objecve method for gathering the data, so the results are consistent and interpretable. Finally, the most eecve PMOs carefully consider the audience, method, and communicaon frequency for their performance measures, and capture their intenons in a formal communicaons plan. Appropriate communicaon of the performance measures can ensure that stakeholders at all levels of the organizaon are empowered to use the performance informaon and implement correcve acons.

5. Use the Right Tools

In the course of establishing a PMO or working towards improved maturity in a parcular focus area, organizaons are oen involved in establishing standards and providing guidance. As a result, its common to want to adopt tools that can support those standard processes, as well as collect and synthesize data to inform decision making. Unfortunately, this is an area where a dangerous distracon lurks the temptaon to shi focus towards evaluang, acquiring, and deploying complicated soluons. Too many organizaons make signicant investments in tools and infrastructure that are dicult for the average sta person to use eecvely, dont deliver value to all stakeholders, and require expensive addons to obtain necessary funconality.

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Top 10 Habits of Highly Eecve PMOs Instead of the tool acng as an enabling technology, the user community struggles to use it eecvely, and it becomes a stumbling block to increasing the project and porolio management maturity of the organizaon. Instead, organizaons are beer served by taking a broader view of the tool selecon and implementaon process, recognizing that the sweet spot of high-performance results from the balanced intersecon of tools, process and people. The right choice is a full featured tool that ghtly integrates with an organizaons processes, provides excellent ease of use, and delivers rich support to the user community. Mers PMO Central delivers this by providing our PPM Central soware in tandem with the process and people that drive the high-performance PMO. Mers PPM Central provides a complete feature set covering all the process areas dened in PMIs Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK), and a workow engine that can guide user interacons with the system to ensure theyre operang in accordance with standard business processes. Within the PMO Central environment, users have access to a learning portal that provides rich content computer based training and help documents not only

covering PPM Central, but also project and porolio management best pracces, process documentaon, and any other training resources the organizaon wants users to have access to. This content is delivered via a full course management system providing users with structured learning that tests their knowledge and improves their project and porolio management competencies. Finally, users benet from unlimited virtual contact with PMO Central analysts via live chat, email, or phone. Mers PMO Central analysts can work alongside a user to solve a problem, provide expert project management guidance, eld requests for detailed data analysis, and even help organizaons understand how their maturity compares to their industry peers.

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Top 10 Habits of Highly Eecve PMOs This access to experienced, knowledgeable experts amplies the project management maturity of the organizaon, and speeds both tool and process adopon simultaneously.

6. Employ a PMO Help Desk

A PMO help desk provides specialized support to project teams using project management soware and provides deep experse in specialty areas, such as earned value analysis or risk management. Mers PMO Central analysts serve as a virtual support team becoming the subject maer experts needed by your organizaon to standardize process and ensure industry best pracces are eecvely used. Every PMO should provide project support when required, but this can be costly without the proper infrastructure if the PMO is sll immature or if organizaonal size and complexity requires more extensive in-house support. The PMO Central help desk is available to provide unlimited and On-Demand project support using various channels of communicaon, including online chat, email, and phone. Mers PMO Central is staed with cered experts allowing you to focus on your core competencies.

7. Oer Training for Project Teams

Eecve PMOs realize that experienced project leadership goes a long way towards ensuring exceponal performance. Somemes organizaons can aord to recruit the experienced resources, but its oen easier and cheaper to grow them in house. As the champions of project process and best pracces, a core funcon of the PMO is to help grow mature, knowledgeable project managers and teams. In order to provide this support, PMOs need to establish a structured training curriculum, and make learning resources easy for sta to nd, search, and ulize. Furthermore, just making these resources available isnt enough eecve PMOs track the progression of sta members through the training curriculum and test to make sure that real learning has taken place. With this kind of structure in place, the PMO is also well posioned to be able to make recommendaons on who has the skills to handle new work that the organizaon might want to take on. Mers PMO Central gives you a jumpstart by providing an online Learning Center for your sta with a full project management curriculum. Users can take self-paced, interacve training, with topics ranging from: Mers PPM Central tool training; Project and porolio management topics like risk or earned value; Aconable process documentaon used both as supporng material and for use in rening internal processes.

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Top 10 Habits of Highly Eecve PMOs Aer compleng each class, users have the opon to demonstrate their knowledge by taking an embedded exam. The rich feature set allows you to set up pre-requisite courses to ensure that your sta is progressing through the curriculum in an appropriate fashion, and gives you the ability to idenfy your high performers. All course curriculums are registered with the Project Management Instute (PMI), with embedded links so users can easily claim Professional Development Units (PDUs) towards maintaining or achieving their Project Management Professional (PMP) cercaon.

8. Manage Stakeholder Communicaon

Stakeholders need to be carefully considered as you establish and operate your PMO. In order to funcon eecvely, project managers need to see the PMO as a helpful resource, and not just a whistleblower to higher management about what theyre doing wrong. By going through the exercise of creang a stakeholder communicaons plan, you can formalize the value statements for each audience in your organizaon, and dene how and when youll communicate with them, and the content of your messaging. This careful planning can make sure that youre meeng the expectaons of your stakeholders at every level, and have the exibility to adjust to changing circumstances. As important as communicaon is, it can sll be a me consuming drag on your PMO if not handled eciently. Manual preparaon of status reports and metrics, bubbled up through email chains and mulple consolidaon steps can distract project managers who have to break o project work to support such data calls. Mers PPM Central facilitates cross-organizaonal communicaon by serving as a central hub for the project team, and making high level or detailed informaon available to stakeholders on demand without me consuming manual processing. Project teams spend more me working and less me compiling status and metrics and informaon latency drops dramacally.

9. Conduct Project Audits

Internal project audits provide metrics regarding compliance with PMO guidelines and processes. They can help make sure the organizaon is preserving the right project arfacts. Separate and disnct from lessons learned acvies, a project audit is a comprehensive review of project arfacts and can be iniated for a variety of reasons, including project complexity, phase review, and review of the business viability of the project. Conducted by imparal, non-advocate sta, project audits are another method of detecng weaknesses and prompng the appropriate remediaon plan. Mers PPM Central and PMO Central make supporng and conducng project audits easier. Since so much of the informaon about the execuon and planning of the work is already in PPM Central, employees dont have to do extra work to prepare for an audit. They can simply make their project available to the

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Top 10 Habits of Highly Eecve PMOs auditor in PPM Central. With both the process guidance and objecve evidence of compliance in one place, audit teams can rapidly complete their work and publish their ndings faster.

10. Create a PMO Roadmap

If you dont know where youre going, any direcon will do - but uncoordinated eorts arent going to result in a highly eecve PMO theyll more likely result in its failure. Just like any other organizaon, PMOs are under constant pressure to demonstrate tangible results. And like any other organizaon that is growing and evolving over me, its important to set expectaons. A PMO roadmap documents the vision of the PMO as goals and milestones to be achieved. A roadmap acts as a kind of maturity framework, communicang to an organizaon what the PMO is working on in the near term, and how the PMO intends to deliver benets over the upcoming months or even years. To build a PMO roadmap, start by conducng a maturity assessment and scoring how well your organizaon is execung each of the primary process areas of PPM. Once the maturity assessment is complete, begin priorizing the areas where improvement is most important to the project organizaon. Finally, be realisc about the goals and areas where the PMO can have an impact in a relavely short meframe. For example, if the organizaon already has projects that are doing a good job with Risk Management, and have some established standards, rolling out those standards to the rest of the organizaon might be a good quick win. Credibility is key for PMO longevity, so eecve PMOs build roadmaps that help them establish early credibility, and manage future performance expectaons. Mer understands the communicaon and planning thats necessary for PMOs to gain organizaonal tracon, and begins each new client engagement by creang a powerful visualizaon of the PMOs strategic roadmap. This visualizaon is always available in PPM Central, for PMO members or stakeholders to refer to a constant reference point for what the PMO has accomplished to date, and the future value it is planning on delivering. By reviewing and updang the roadmap monthly, the PMO stays focused on the right goals and objecves.

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Top 10 Habits of Highly Eecve PMOs

Conclusion
PMOs have increasingly become an integral player within organizaons. As an execuon specialist for organizaonal strategic iniaves, PMOs provide the necessary discipline, process, and resources for managing the cost and quality of one of an organizaons most important assets, its projects. Mer brings the Top 10 Habits of Highly Eecve PMOs together in PMO Central, a rst-of-its-kind oering designed to provide organizaons with the framework and support they need to realize the benets of a PMO in a fracon of the me and cost of tradional implementaons. PMO Central integrates our PPM soware, ppm central, with a virtualized set of project and porolio management services. Mer analysts deliver policy guidelines, best pracces and workows for porolio and project management disciplines. Mers PMO Central provides virtualized training environments, help desk assistance, and analycal and decision-making support. Your PMO Central team works with you to ensure consistent communicaon to your organizaon and progress along your strategic roadmap. By outsourcing this competency, organizaons realize inial and ongoing cost savings. The virtual PMO provides subject maer experse that most organizaons do not have in house at an aracve price point. Finally, the focus on ongoing process improvement ensures the sustainability of the PMO within any organizaon. With PMO Central On Demand, customers nally have the tools, the support, and a clear path to achieving the goals for their PMO Central empowers the modern project enterprise to workforward.

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