Building a PMO to last starts with a successful team. But a successful team isn’t built on processes, systems, and frameworks alone. They are able to draw upon the strength of their relationships to solve challenges, obtain investment, and have a seat at the table when it comes to influencing key decisions. This is particularly important for Project Management Offices (PMOs), where their value is frequently challenged, yet their importance to the success of portfolios, programs, and projects remains constant.
Demonstrating the Value of the PMO
Technical skills, methodologies, and best practices are crucial for providing structure, discipline, and driving continuous improvement. These elements, coupled with a focus on key insights and analytics, ideally lead to better outcomes over time. However, their importance diminishes if there’s a lack of engagement or willingness to drive the necessary changes to support their adoption and use for decision-making. How can an organization be convinced to invest in the PMO? Why should executives dedicate their time, energy, and resources? Is demonstrating value through metrics alone sufficient to gain their commitment?
Relationships are at the core of solving this challenge.
Building Trust in the PMO
No matter how data-driven an organisation is, or claims to be, PMOs can’t succeed on data alone. The decisions PMOs seek to be effective more often than not require active engagement and support from executives, project sponsors, and project teams; who all are juggling competing priorities and pressures, and have their own perceptions of value. Managing perceived value is important and so often this comes down to how well the PMO is trusted.
This is the critical focus area for PMO leaders – to understand these perspectives, and ensure strong alignment in creating value by solving the right problems and creating the right relationships, cutting through the competing priorities and pressures in order to build buy-in and trust. So how do you do it? From my perspective, it comes down to:
- Knowing your stakeholders,
- Solving the right problems at the right time,
- Being prepared to ‘flex’ on how you achieve mutually agreed outcomes.
Knowing your stakeholders: It really comes down to understanding their motivations and drivers, which data and insights can certainly help with, but more importantly, spending the time to know their priorities, challenges and opportunities; and how the PMO can support in addressing these. Look to have meaningful conversations and engagement – meetings for the sake of meetings is not a strategy. Rather, find points of engagement to start a conversation and build from there.
Solving the right problems at the right time: As great as it would be to fix all the issues, there is a finite amount of time, funding, and capacity to do so. The old adage applies: if you try to help everyone you end up helping no one.
Begin by understanding your stakeholders’ challenges, not dictating solutions. Solve their problems to build credibility and gain support for your priorities. It is also essential to ruthlessly prioritise, letting less critical issues go to focus resources, support and energy on what is perceived to be the most important, balancing with what may actually be based on key insights and data. In many instances they are the same, but sometimes they are not; so there may be situations where trade-offs need to be made to obtain or sustain active buy-in and support to solve challenges now and into the future.
Be prepared to adapt: Focus on the objective and outcome that need to be achieved, but remain flexible on how you and the team get there. Allowing stakeholders to contribute and co-create with you enables a sense of ownership and involvement. It also helps bridge the gap between what is perceived to be ‘ambiguous concepts’ (particularly in low maturity organisations) and the need to drive understanding and support for change.
Conclusion
For PMOs, gaining a seat at the strategic table begins with cultivating relationships that enable joint decision-making, more focused project management, and improved outcomes. PMO leaders can achieve a more strategic position within the larger organization by understanding their stakeholders’ motivations, aligning strategy with decision-making, and staying flexible in the face of change.
These are some practical tips on how PMO leaders can really strengthen their focus on relationships at all levels within the organisations they operate within, to cut through and build a sustainable service that lasts. Active, ongoing support helps navigate the maturity journey to improved portfolio, program, and project outcomes that are of key importance, taking people along this journey.
About Prism PPM
Leading organizations use Prism PPM to support the strategic goals of their PMO. When teams and stakeholders work from a central source of truth for project prioritization and intake, resource management, and KPIs and reporting, projects are more effectively managed and drive greater benefit realization. Talk to Prism PPM about your project and portfolio management needs: book a 30-minute conversation or a 60-minute demo with a member of our team.
About the Author
Tony Antonios is a results-driven leader with a proven track record of orchestrating large-scale transformations and driving operational excellence to deliver significant financial and strategic outcomes. Proven record of building high-performing teams, partnering with CEOs, Boards and C-suite leaders in complex, regulated industries such as healthcare and telecommunications.