Are you looking for a simple way to improve your PMO’s focus, capability and value? A PMO Pulse Check is the perfect first step on your roadmap to augmenting the benefits that your PMO provides.
What is a PMO Pulse Check?
A PMO Pulse Check is an assessment of the PMO services you offer with the aim of giving you a report of actionable findings and recommendations. It focuses mainly on how well the PMO’s customers – normally senior managers – are being served by the PMO.
Pulse Checks are a little like maturity assessments for PMOs, but we like to think of them as more rounded. After all, your PMO could be mature without being useful to the business, so customer satisfaction sits alongside capability and maturity in the measures.
A Pulse Check should be more than a PMO assessment questionnaire. It looks at:
- The structure of the project management office
- How the project management processes work
- How information flows to senior managers for decision making, and how responsive the PMO is to executive requests
- What metrics are in place for tracking project performance
- Risk management
And more.
There are lots of benefits from carrying out a PMO review, especially when it’s conducted by independent third parties who can truly compare your offerings to those in other organizations. Let’s look at 5 benefits of doing a PMO assessment.
1. Benchmark your PMO
Do you really know how your PMO compares to others in the sector? Or even against best practice PMO standards more broadly?
A PMO assessment is a way of getting a benchmark for your PMO. It’s useful to see how your PMO is performing so you can do those kinds of comparisons, but it’s even more valuable to objectively rate how you are currently performing.
That assessment then forms the benchmark against which you can track your changes and improvements. As with all project metrics, if you don’t know where you currently are, you can’t measure how much of an impact your changes are having.
When you model your PMO capacity and create your personal baseline, you’ll be able to track progress and report on the improvements you are making.
2. Begin your roadmap
The benchmark tells you where you are: now you need to plan where to go.
One of the outputs of a PMO assessment is a step-by-step roadmap to help you address the findings of the study. It’s OK if you aren’t sure exactly how to implement the recommendations, because the roadmap will give you the journey.
We’ve found that an improvement roadmap is a good communication tool as it helps both the PMO team and the leadership community see what’s possible. PMO maturity is a journey. The roadmap helps you plan your next steps.
3. Improve focus
So much to do and so little time! Where should your PMO team be spending their efforts?
The roadmap gives you the big picture, and as that journey can sometimes feel overwhelming, another benefit is the improved focus you get from a PMO assessment. All you have to do is work through the recommendations and make the changes, and you’ll soon start to notice how much of a difference that is making to the services and value offered by the PMO.
Going through the exercise will uncover the areas where you can add the most value. Consider it like a mini-gap analysis: the results pinpoint where you could be making more of an impact. These are definitely areas that should be on your roadmap, but you’ll find out where you can increase capability right now. Focus on where your team can add more benefit to the business, because often those quick wins will make a real difference in terms of PMO positioning.
4. Align to the business drivers
Are you really aligned to business drivers? You probably think you are, but how effective has your alignment been?
A pulse check uncovers what those business drivers are and helps you see exactly where your PMO’s services align – and where they don’t.
It’s important to pay attention to how projects and programs within the PMO align to the strategic objectives. When projects don’t support the business’ strategic goals, you can invest a lot of time and money into something only to find that by the end of the year, the company isn’t any closer to doing what it wanted to achieve… even if all the projects delivered were successful. Making the right choice about which projects to start is crucial if you want to ensure your PMO supports the overall vision of the company.
Where the maturity assessment identifies gaps, you can plan to address them to make sure your PMO is adding as much value as it can to the organization.
5. Gain decision-making insight
Deeper understanding and insight by the PMO and project managers of how the PMO supports. senior leadership and business decisions
It does take some effort on your part to set up and work with expert consultants to carry out an independent PMO maturity assessment or review like this. You should expect to set aside 5-10 days for an on-site review of how the PMO serves your internal community. During that time, consultants will interview a range of senior managers and project delivery professionals in the business before sitting with you for a full debrief.
There is so much to gain from this small investment as the insights and actionable findings will let you quickly take your PMO services to the next level. If you are ready to boost the capability of your PMO with recommendations tailored to your environment, then consider a PMO Pulse Check as your fast-track to maturity.