A PMO or Project Management Office is a function within organizations that supports project teams by providing and implementing tools, techniques, and processes to manage projects well. According to Gartner there are four distinct types of PMOs, namely, Centralised, Compliance, Activist, and Delivery.

The Centralised PMO provides a centralised platform for knowledge and experience-sharing between experienced and inexperienced performers so that work can happen efficiently and the Compliance PMO helps in establishing standard practices via systems for monitoring & controlling variances.

The Delivery PMO focusses on the planning & controlling of the tactical execution of projects and believes in proactive project management through repeatable processes and techniques (driven through a results-based work culture) while the Activist PMO favours an enabling approach rather than a controlling approach and reviews business cases of project proposals through a project portfolio dashboard-based monitoring & control. This PMO is strategic and also follows a results-based culture.

But why do organizations require a PMO at all?

The benefits of a PMO

PMOs are invaluable to project companies looking to increase their efficiency through better monitoring of projects. Using a PMO will streamline coordination (usually a bottleneck in projects) leading to clarity and a more strategic way of working, which is beneficial to project outcomes. According to PMI, PMOs have successfully demonstrated leadership in the following areas:

• Standardization of process, framework, and methodology
• Resource management – skills and allocation
• Reporting and dashboards to various stakeholders
• Project change management and lessons learned
• Risk management, scheduling, and cost tracking
• The professional development and career path of PMO staff

Now let’s look at what a Digital PMO is and where it fits into today’s construction project landscape.

Anything recurring or repeated has the potential to be standardized and and then digitalized – that, in a nutshell, is the principle behind Digital PMOs. Today, with the availability of economical and effective cloud-based PMO tools, most of the functions performed by the traditional PMOs are undergoing digitalization, especially in the following functions:

• Schedule and progress management
• Engineering deliverable management
• Procurement deliverable management
• Construction deliverable management
• Cost and cashflow management
• Contract management
• Resource management
• Project quality management
• Safety management
• Risk management
• Interface management
• Snagging & closeout

 

In short, a Digital PMO makes it possible to:

• Get accurate and real-time project progress information any time through fully automated, intelligent and customizable dash boards
• Get notifications about outliers or exceptions (cost, schedule, risk, quality, safety etc) so that management teams can focus on the problematic areas. This is called ‘management by exception’ and it saves a lot of effort and improves the overall effectiveness of project management.
• Perform forecasting of cost and schedules, thereby facilitating proactive project management. The ability to prevent problems before they occur reduces the risk of slippages and overruns.
• Build compliance into the digitalized workflows and thus eliminate the need for time-consuming audits via corrective/preventive actions.
• Create accurate current / historical data repositories for effective integration with other tools.

The new role of the PMO

 

With the adoption of a ‘Digital PMO’, anything that needs to be performed repeatedly to monitor and control projects can be automated and the traditional PMO personnel can focus more on Value Delivery and transform themselves into VDOs (Value Delivering Organizations) or  into Activist PMOs who are strategic in nature.The main difference between traditional PMOs and Value Delivery Offices (VDOs) or Value Management Office (VMOs) are that the traditional ones focus on time, cost, process tailoring, tools selection, training, & compiling reports whereas a VDO or Activist PMO focuses on bringing value to the organizations and aligning projects & programs to the overall business strategy.

Conclusion

The Digital PMO can perform many of the mundane activities performed by traditional PMOs  efficiently and economically with the help of affordable cloud-based tools and today with most Digital PMO solutions available on a subscription model, they are affordable even for small organizations. Plus, the best digital PMO tools have built-in industry best practices and will eliminate the need for compliance audits as there is no room for deviations, and the accurate data repository created by these tools comes in handy for data-based decision support which speeds up decision-making and integration with other systems. Digital dashboard-based Digital PMOs are also fairly easy to use and provide a fast route to efficient project delivery maturity.