PMO and PPM

Project Management Offices (PMO) have existed since the 80’s of the 20th century. They have been and are a fundamental piece for good management, optimization and standardization within companies. They have helped to standardize project management methods, to optimize resource allocation, to measure and evolve key indicators, to train project managers? And specifically, within the part of management methods, they have also been involved in the discipline of Project Portfolio Management (PPM).

It so happens that the forms of management have been evolving, especially in the last decade, towards mostly hybrid models, in which different methodological approaches to product or service development coexist. It has also happened that traditional management offices have generally incurred in a series of bad practices, among which the following stand out:

• Collection of useless data for effective management and/or generation of reports or reports of little value (vanity metrics).
• Implementation of processes without tools or vice versa, which leads to a lack of quality and sufficient data for decision making.
• Failure to focus on capacity and load adjustment in a realistic manner, reserving time for operations and technical debt reduction.
• Failure to establish a global operating model that ensures that dedication is aligned with strategic decisions.

PMOs must therefore evolve to integrate metrics and visions derived from this new hybrid world, which combines traditional management visions with Lean/Agile management. They must also evolve to eliminate the bad practices that sometimes turn them into an unhelpful and self-serving body rather than a powerful weapon for the management of the company. And on the portfolio side, they must also evolve toward models that are capable of organizing value in a world where initiatives no longer all take the form of long-term projects with an associated budget. Initiatives now have more quarterly visions, and the “agile” parts of a company do not finance projects but stable teams.

To the above complexity, let’s add the fact that many IT departments struggle daily with a hybrid dedication, in which its members do not have exclusive dedications neither to projects nor to operations or services, but many times it is mixed. And it is also mixed with external collaborators.

The solution lies in the evolution from project management offices to value management offices (Value Management Office, VMO). At TecnoFor we advise to study the functions of the VMO in four axes:

• Portfolio management (PPM) and management support.
• Demand and dependencies management.
• Knowledge management.
• Processes, tools and metrics.

We can help you evolve your current PMO into a VMO, both by providing training and by actively accompanying the PMO in a transformation process. And, if you don’t have a PMO, we can even set up an outsourced VMO to serve as an efficient advisory body in a hybrid environment, allowing your company to focus on its processes, products and services.