PMO Roles

Role of PMO as it is being practiced by several organizations is not what it is meant for. People establish PMOs generally as a fashion without knowing what it means to do. PMBOK Guide explains these roles very well and very few organizations implement them in the true spirit. First role of PMO is to be a centralized body to establish project management guidelines, methodologies, procedures and select appropriate standards at organizational level to be implemented by all projects and programs of that organization. Next, enforcing the established standards and procedures with due authority delegated by top level management, and ensuring all project and program managers understand these guidelines. Thirdly to mentor, counsel and provide guidance to all projects and programs to work under these guidelines, while providing them requisite training in concepts, tools, techniques and even software. Only after PMO has done all that can we entrust it to monitor various projects and programs by collecting their progress reports and summarizing it for top level management. It also provides help to projects ad programs in sharing various resources used across projects and programs. The very last role a PMO can have, obviously after it has done all the previously mentioned roles, a PMO can be optionally made responsible for managing all the projects and programs in the organization. This is not advisable as each project and program with have project/program manager/sponsor already working on that, but in case, we have a highly automated system, like a robot, we can have all projects and programs managed by a single centralized entity, a Super PMO.