What should a PMO meeting cover in your organization? Project Management Office teams can be made up of a diverse group. You may have project management experts, or the project management team leader, project co-ordinators or others in more junior positions, analysts, software experts, data experts, business leaders, trainers, strategists and more.
When you get the PMO management team together, how do you draw all these different areas into a meeting?
Your PMO meeting will necessarily look different throughout the year based on the organization’s strategic priorities and your own development needs as a team. But there are some things that it is worth including periodically on the agenda at your team PMO meeting. Here are 5 items that you can include in your management team PMO meeting.
1. Project Deep Dives
Every so often, perhaps once a quarter, take a project and do a deep dive into it. Your team probably do project reviews already, as a support function for the project managers. It’s useful to have a project review to ensure you are sticking to the methodology (or deviating when it’s appropriate to do so) and the output from a project review can make a useful focal point during a PMO management team meeting.
Get the project manager to come along to the session and jointly present the findings. This shouldn’t be a witch hunt or an opportunity to criticise: the project manager should know in advance what is coming up. This is about sharing the process of project reviews with the rest of the team to learn how others do it. This can offer opportunities to improve the project review process and give you the chance to get first hand feedback about the value of the review.
2. PMO Strategy
You have a strategy for the PMO, don’t you? Every so often, you’ll want to share that and build the next phase with the support of your management team. Solicit opinions and advice about the direction of the PMO. Work together to create a vision for the PMO that you can all buy into.
You can also be pragmatic about your progress towards reaching that strategy. Discuss the progress you have made as a team on the developments of the PMO functions. Perhaps there are new services you are rolling out, new processes or templates. These are the meetings to check in with your colleagues, provide a progress update and ask for help if required.
You can also plan ahead for the shorter term. Talk about the new functions you want to add to the department and work those into your plan so that you have a clear idea of when you will be able to bring those on stream.
3. Staffing
Like any management team, there are some operational issues to discuss and staffing is one of them. This is particularly important for evolving PMOs, where you may not yet be at full strength. Talk about the types of skills that you have in the team and those that are missing. This is an opportunity to think about staff development plans for individuals or for the project community as a whole.
It’s also a chance to evaluate whether you are adequately staffed to meet the needs of the business. If you conclude that you are not, you’ll most likely have to produce a business case to justify hiring new staff, and your existing team can help you with that.
4. Communications
It’s worth talking about the outreach and communication efforts you are doing as a team. You may want to allocate this role to an individual in the team or split out the work so that everyone does some kind of communication activity.
This could cover anything from the upcoming program of training on offer from the PMO to making sure that key business owners know about the impact of not completing a business case for their latest project idea.
It might be helpful to have a senior member of the PMO team act as “account manager” to each of the major business functions or units. They can be the voice of the PMO for that community, and then feedback to the PMO team about what’s going on in that area.
5. Any Other Business
Because every PMO meeting agenda needs to finish with the opportunity for everyone to raise additional points and be heard. In fact, it’s helpful to ask for AOB at the beginning of the meeting. Note down the topics and who raised them, and then come to discuss them at the end.
The purpose of asking for them in advance is that it gives you an idea of how much time might be needed to cover the items raised. If no one has AOB, then you can leave just a few minutes at the end to discuss any final thoughts. If several people have AOB topics and they sound significant, you would want to leave a little longer to go through them, or acknowledge that you won’t have time to discuss them in detail today.
Of course, your PMO management team meetings can include anything that’s relevant to your organization and team, so these are simply suggestions for topics that would be worth including from time to time.
Create a standing agenda of the topics you discuss regularly at your PMO meeting, and then add extra items like these to it when appropriate.