Once your new Project Management Office is set up, you need to find ways to tell people that it exists and what it can do. Promote your PMO. This can feel a bit uncomfortable, especially if you have come from a project delivery organization or an established PMO where this wasn’t needed. But think about […]
Top Competencies for PMO Leaders
It’s not like a project manager, where you have a number of people in the project management role, delivering projects and (hopefully) learning from each other. The PMO leader position can be quite lonely. There’s no in-built support network. There might be other leaders at the same level on the corporate hierarchy but none will […]
Keep, Kill, Reconsider – Strategies for Improving Governance
Do you consider keeping, killing or reconsidering stategies for improving governance? Does this sound familiar? Your project teams are working really hard but you’re still seeing a pattern of failing projects and projects that fail to deliver the expected benefits. This is a challenge for lots of Project Management Offices, especially when you are starting […]
Watch What You (Don’t) Say – Building Credibility
Good Communications Your senior management team and your Project Management Office (PMO) team are constantly sending out messages about what is valued and what’s not. This is the space where integrity, credibility and good communications mix and it’s important to get right if you are doing anything that relates to changing working practices, such as […]
How To Boost Executive Support for Projects
It’s a fact: Projects go better with executive support. Study after study shows that active sponsorship is a factor in project success. The more the buy in comes from senior levels in the enterprise, the more likely it is that your projects will deliver against your business case forecasts and achieve the benefits they set […]
5 Tips for Managing Conflict At Work
So much has been written about managing conflict at work. On training courses, when students get to the conflict management part, you can see some of them glaze over or repeat the mantra: Competing, Accommodating, Avoiding, Compromising, Collaborating: the 5 well-know styles for managing a bust up. That’s a problem. Conflict happens because we are […]
Are You Receiving Accurate Project Status Reports?
When project managers turn in their weekly or monthly status reports, the real work begins for the Project Management Office. Even if your project management software does a lot of the data crunching for you, there’s still an element of human interaction to review and check the information before consolidated dashboards or reports leave the […]
Portfolio Management in Small Companies
“Portfolio management in small companies– that’s something only big firms do, isn’t it?” Not at all! Even small businesses can benefit from taking a portfolio management approach to managing their projects. In fact, you could argue that portfolio management is even more important in smaller companies. In these businesses, taking a risk on the wrong […]
5 Pitfalls of Managing Large Portfolios And How To Manage Them
Managing a large portfolio of projects and programs comes with its own challenges. PMO leaders working with large corporate portfolios face a number of pitfalls. This is especially where the project management maturity has grown over time and the portfolio has evolved and scaled almost organically. There comes a tipping point where it’s important to […]
5 Red Flags Every PMO Manager Should Watch For
5 Red Flags Every PMO Manager Should Watch For You run a great PMO. Your team are engaged and everything is going according to your three-year strategic plan. That’s wonderful – but it doesn’t mean you should get complacent. As with any business team (especially the ones not directly linked to revenue generation) it’s a […]