10 July 2009

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The Changing Role of the PMO

Today, many organizations are repositioning their PMO from a task management role to a strategic partner—a move that can pay dividends in any economy.

Case in point: Burlington Coat Factory. The Burlington, New Jersey, USA-based discount clothing retail chain began making changes to its PMO in early 2008.

Prior to its transformation, the company’s PMO primarily executed capital and large-scale projects on a one-at-a-time basis.  

These days, though, it helps leaders throughout the organization see which projects are scheduled and which resources are assigned to them for the entire year.

“I think what we have done is given the executive team the ability to drive its initiatives in a much more strategic manner,” says Barbara Verde, senior director of portfolio management. “We’re making sure we’re in a position to capitalize on what we see as our opportunities when those opportunities open up.”

 The result has been less redundancy and better fiscal planning.

“Every business unit puts together their project requests, which had to go through some basic financial justification and preliminary planning,” she says. “This means we are able to look at which projects support the strategic initiatives of the company.”

For those tasked with changing the role of the PMO, Ms. Verde offers a few tips:

1. Sometimes you have to think evolution, not revolution. When Ms. Verde was hired in October 2007, she had to start slow with the specifics of project management.

Instead of introducing the PMO team to the five phases of A Guide to Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide), for example, she started with three. The beginning phase focused on initiation; the middle phase included control, plan and execute; and the end phase helped the team close.

“If I had tried to define all five phases and the documents associated with them, they would have [grown bored and stopped paying attention] right away,” Ms. Verde says. “So I had to take some time to tailor what needed to be done to the organization, instead of making it conform to what I felt it needed to do.”

2. You have a lot to learn. Like many project managers, Ms. Verde came to Burlington with an IT background. Yet, while most of the projects she manages require technological solutions, Ms. Verde has taken an active interest in learning how the retail side of the organization functions. 

Demonstrating a willingness to learn has strengthened the PMO’s relationship with other departments and created goodwill among initially skeptical internal partners.

“In this last project we were working on, the project managers [were unpacking cartons] and doing whatever needed to be done to make the project happen,” she says. “That shows we’re not here to police the business, we’re here to deliver for the business.”

3. The best way to win over skeptics is with results. Not everyone at the 36-year-old company was immediately sold on the new process. There was concern that the planning process would delay the execution of their strategies.

To overcome that resistance, Ms. Verde worked closely with her stakeholders to foster and facilitate proper planning. Although there was a lot of pushback, once business leaders saw the payoff, they were more accepting of project management processes on a wider scale.

“Getting people to understand that stepping back and planning something so that you can execute on it effectively the first time has been a real struggle,” she says. “One of the biggest ways that we’re working past that is just continuing to deliver the projects using a planning process and hitting the mark every time.”

The overarching theme when making changes to your PMO is to work with your organization. Move at a pace that is comfortable to your team, and don’t be afraid to adapt processes.

For more information on PMOs, see The Changing PMO on PMI.org. Also see Taking Baby Steps—Implementing Project Management with Limited Resources for more ideas on starting slow with project management implementation.