The Role of the PMO in an Agile World

What’s the role of a Project Management Office (PMO) within the context of an agile organization? In this article I take a deep look at the future of the PMO in a world that’s growing more uncertain, changeable, and dynamic by the day.

What Does a Project Management Office Actually Do?

The PMO is an organizational structure. That said, there can be a single one, fully centralized, or there can be several within the same organization, spread across different areas. For better or worse, PMOs have a specific domain over projects - and some of them look a bit further, toward strategy, through conceptual instruments called programs or portfolios.

That’s why PMOs exist: to help orchestrate, coordinate, and, in some cases, direct projects within the organization or department. They bring structure and meaning to the project life cycle, and offer visibility into project status.

When an organization has real project experience - or, say, is an organization whose entire operation is projects (an architecture firm or an event-planning agency, for instance) - the PMO can play a crucial role in the operation and in the organization’s strategic decision-making. In these situations, where the PMO sits close to the executive level (C-Level), we find the term Enterprise PMO, or EPMO.

How Does the PMO Relate to Projects and Operations?

In a dichotomous world, split into two opposite poles, the organization gets split in two as well. On one side we leave strategy and its projects - as instruments of change and of turning strategy into reality. On the other, we have operations and its everyday routine, with its productivity indicators and results. In this kind of view, deeply rooted in project management culture, the PMO only plays on one side, and often has no idea what’s really going on in operations, or how operations itself affects progress on the strategic plans.

The Vision of an Agile PMO

In an agile world , this dichotomy between projects and operations dissolves. Both poles merge and, even better, both get placed under the authority of “work teams.”

Sounds tangled? It isn’t!

The agile PMO has the same purpose as any PMO: to increase the odds that all (or the most important) strategic objectives get met. And in that sense, it’s people, organized into work teams, who complete the tasks, build the products, and deliver the services.

A concept that’s gained relevance in recent years is Value Streams - which, honestly, is hard for me to translate precisely. If people are organized into work teams, those teams almost always serve a Value Stream. Teams work to support a line of business, or the development and operation of a product. In that context, we have activities that belong to operations, and others dedicated to bringing in changes and improvements - like projects.

So what happens to projects and operations, then?

Both concepts keep existing, but teams focus more on the value generated by the activities they carry out for a product or service. Conceptual project structures will keep existing too - some independently, others blended into operational activities. The agile PMO, then, is the one who sees the whole picture.

The Relationship Between the Project Manager and the Agile PMO

From the perspective of the project leader - whether they’re called a director, manager, administrator, or project coordinator - the PMO offers one primary service: supporting management decisions through expert advice and access to information and data from other projects.

If we agree, for the purposes of this article, that a project manager’s core goal is to complete the assigned project according to its tactical objectives, meeting expectations, and delivering good results, then we have to accept that the PMO’s main goal is to strengthen the project manager’s work.

Anachronistic PMOs whose sole purpose has been to define strict processes and templates are obsolete, and doomed to extinction. In my opinion, these PMOs were designed to turn the most enthusiastic project managers into automatons - people with no judgment of their own, dedicated to taking notes, writing minutes, and generating reports. Nothing could be further from agile thinking, its values, and its principles.

PMOs whose sole purpose has been defining processes and templates are obsolete, and doomed to extinction.

In the world of organizational agility, the PMO can play an important role and become a center of excellence, where the skills of directors, SMs, and coaches get strengthened. It can also be a center of experimentation for validating practices or supporting change management processes.

Every project manager faces challenges tied to how we do our jobs, and having a group within the organization that lets us reflect on the challenges we face, or share experiences that strengthen our judgment and, ultimately, the decisions we make for the benefit of strategy and projects, can be a real competitive advantage.

The Relationship Between the Organization and the Agile PMO

With the rise of agility inside organizations comes change to their structures too. I’ve seen entire PMOs disappear at banks, government agencies, and companies in the real economy. And with them, capable people leave too - experienced leaders who, without fully understanding what happened, get replaced by people with no management experience, whose greatest management achievement has been getting certified as a Scrum Master.

I don’t mean to say an experienced project manager can’t become a good SM, or that a novice SM can’t grow into a great manager and/or facilitator. I just want to highlight the fact that, in that equation, we subtracted “experience.”

What If We Just Got Rid of the PMO?

Years ago, during a project steering committee at a large corporation where I was consulting - it was actually more of a project program - we hit a moment of chaos: discussions, everyone talking at once, side conversations looking for someone to blame and reasons for the delays and cost overruns. At one point, the president leaned over and said something like: “Do you think if I fired all these project managers and shut down the PMO, we’d be worse off? Not that long ago we ran projects and had no PMO.” I had no words. I didn’t know what to say. I wasn’t part of the PMO, I wasn’t part of the corporation - I was a consultant for one specific component.

I thought about it - what is a PMO’s real value? Was he right? Weren’t we able to run projects before?

The PMO isn’t there to eliminate problems. Project managers aren’t magicians who make bad things stop happening. Their job is to improve management - to strengthen our capabilities for handling these hard moments, and, through that, empower the organization’s decision-making.

If management is chaotic, even the smallest benefit a PMO could offer disappears.

Benefits of an Agile PMO for the Organization

Agile or not, organizations are all after the same thing: to be born, grow, flourish, and never die - well, not all of them, some have exit strategies, but you get my point. Here’s a list of the benefits a PMO should offer the organization.

1. Above all, the PMO should be a beacon for the organization - a place to go for evidence of actual performance, of where we really stand against our strategic plans. What good is all the execution data, budget, progress, and hours invested, if it doesn’t help me make better tactical and strategic decisions?
2. Beyond being a beacon, the PMO can strengthen our project execution capabilities, and with that, improve our ability to “make strategy real” - to actually deliver on our plans.

What does strengthening project execution capabilities actually mean? Well, here’s a list of things that can positively affect an organization’s ability to execute successful projects:

• Developing leaders’ competencies and skills through training and development programs - which today can be online, remote, and asynchronous.
• Offering leaders support and coaching. Helping leaders develop into coaches for their own teams.
• Establishing metrics and helping leaders with performance measurement. Working alongside leaders to identify results and strengthen the continuous improvement process.
• Assessing and adjusting processes based on project needs - favoring and strengthening tailoring over strict compliance.

The Agile PMO and Benefits Management

Finally, one topic I can’t leave out is benefits management . While it’s been around for some years now, the shift in thinking toward agile values, happening across many organizations, forces us to rethink benefits management as something continuous, not just the conquest of a few milestones. Through the concept of Business Value Flow, agility has climbed the organization’s strategic ladder, and today we have agile portfolio management practices like Lean Portfolio Management .

Once again, the agile PMO’s role expands beyond executing projects, into the territory of actually operating the products and services those projects produced. Otherwise, there’d be no way to measure the value of the perceived benefit.

What Other Functions Does the PMO Serve?

This is a very broad question, and the answer - like any good consultant would say - depends on the organization and the nature of its business. That said, I’d love to hear in the comments what good and/or bad experiences you’ve had with PMOs, and what functions they served.