When I started out in project management I remember clearly being told that the lifecycle of a PMO was 7 years. It’s often seen as overhead, and certainly I’ve known organizations where the PMO team was caught in reshuffles and redundancies in a way that other teams were not.
At least, getting people to believe that the Project Management Office adds value is tricky until something goes wrong, and by then it’s too late to build credibility and magic up a PMO when the company has underinvested in it from the start.
And if your PMO is only reporting management activity (like number of reports produced, meetings held) instead of outcomes (risk avoided, decisions accelerated, money saved), then we need to get you to a place where the value is obvious.
So, if that rings any bells for you, or you’re worried that communicating the value of your PMO isn’t landing with leadership as well as it should, this article is for you.
Don’t assume good work speaks for itself
A PMO has to sell its value continuously, the same way a marketing function does, rather than assuming good work speaks for itself. Project managers know this as well – if a project goes well, people ask, “Why did we need you? It was all fine.” And when it goes badly you get the blame!
Project work is hard to justify because so much of it seems nebulous. Regardless, that’s what we have to do in a PMO because we can’t trust that people will inherently know that the function is valuable.
Adopt an ‘internal marketing mindset’ like this:
- Know your audience (stakeholder engagement is key)
- Have a consistent message
- Repeat it in multiple formats
- Make it about them, not about the PMO (the ‘what’s in it for’ of the message, constantly).
That’s a lot like you would do for any project communication plan, so your team definitely already has the skills for this.
How do you measure PMO value?
But what does value look like? As a PMO leader, you might have success criteria for the function, but when you read KPI lists like ‘number of projects delivered successfully’ they don’t really say how YOUR team is supporting the work and what difference YOUR people are making. KPIs are not value, and that could be why your PMO is struggling to make a case for its existence.
Personally, I would like ‘value’ back to organizational goals, strategic objectives, company values and things like that. Value is what someone would miss if it disappeared.
If the PMO vanished tomorrow, what would people actually notice was gone?
For example:
- Executives would probably notice they’d lost visibility and early warning, and nicely formatted PowerPoint slides!
- Project managers might notice they’d lost support, or they might notice nothing at all (which tells you something too)
- Finance would notice forecasts got less reliable
- Team leaders wouldn’t have the information they need for resource management.
- Project portfolio managers wouldn’t have consolidated reporting or risks.
What else do people rely on you for?
If you’re struggling to work out what value looks like for you, it might help to break it down into different categories, like these ones below.
Delivery value
Did the work land, on time, on budget, to quality? Is everyone doing risk management consistently?
KPIs are how you would measure this, but from a PMO perspective, you aren’t actually in there delivering the work, that’s what project teams are doing. So your contribution is indirect and hard to quantify, because you support project management practices and standardization.
Get some feedback from delivery teams about how you supported, facilitating workshops, coaching etc etc, so you have narrative examples to provide.
Decision value
Did the organization make better or faster decisions because the PMO existed? Do you track time-to-decision? Ideally, you should be able to evidence that fewer decisions were made on incomplete information, and there is less time between “we need to decide” and “we decided.” In my experience, senior management care quite a lot about this.
Risk avoided
Another difficult one to quantify because if a project didn’t fail because you identified a risk, there are no heroics to cheer about or delays to report on. If change management was handled well for the cross-functional teams, there are fewer problems with implementation. You can’t KPI your way to counting things that didn’t happen!
But your team’s dependency map or portfolio plan underpins all the ways that you’ve avoided these things.
Capability value
Is the organization better at delivering projects this year than last year? This, of course, relies on you having data from last year, which you might not have as a new PMO. Are standards actually being used, are people more confident, is there less reinventing the wheel project to project? Maybe do a survey and ask people how confident they are with the processes to evidence this?
Removing friction value
I don’t know how you quantify the human side of governance. What I’m talking about is the risk that your PMO hits all the KPIs and looks great on paper but the people you work with still experience the PMO as a pain in the proverbial.
Trust and friction are components of this. If you can build trust and remove friction, you’re winning! Overall, the value you add has to be more than the friction you add, otherwise your overall ‘value scale’ will tip to the wrong side.
Value over time
There’s a time horizon problem that most PMOs face as well. How do you communicate something next month when the difference you are making is only going to show up in improved project management competence over the next year?
Some value is immediate and visible (a report that saved someone two hours this week), some only shows up over quarters or years (an organization that’s better at running projects than it was, project managers who have completed training or been through a mentoring program). PMOs that only claim the fast, visible stuff tend to get treated as an admin function, because that’s all they’re presenting evidence for.
I know I’ve given you a lot of problems in the topics above, but if you can spend a morning with the team, with some good coffee and away from the ping notifications of emails and chats, you can work out how you want to position yourselves. Then build a communication plan that works to highlight those things.
Building the story
We could call this a ‘value narrative’ if you want to be fancy about it, but really it’s simply making sure you know what your message is and how to present it to the people that matter.
Translate PMO activities into business outcomes: ‘We standardized status reporting’ becomes ‘Leadership now gets an accurate view of portfolio risk two weeks earlier than before.’ Another example: ’10 people completed project management software training’ becomes ‘team upskilled’.
Be clear about what services you offer and how those tie back to business value. Even in the early days of your PMO, when you’re all about setting things up, choosing project management frameworks and creating a template library, you can talk about standardization and efficiencies of scale.
Try to keep your message simple. Use a small number of proof points rather than an exhaustive list; you don’t need to keep telling everyone every little thing, but identify a couple of strong examples that help address pain points in the organization instead of multiple weaker examples.
And be careful about using jargon. What really is ‘value-based portfolio management’? Make sure people know what you are talking about!
Be evidence based. If you have a governance KPI library and a maturity/capability assessment, you can pull evidence from both of those. And benefits realization is another good one – when the project teams move on, you can track benefits for the duration, and report on those.
Create your PMO communication plan to get the message out, including feedback loops so you can make changes as necessary.
Overcoming resistance: ‘we’ve always done it this way’
One of the big challenges with any new way of working – and the PMO has to overcome this – is the ‘we’ve always done it this way’ argument.
I think this objection is really about fear of change, added work or loss of control, not a real belief the old way was better. And I know from my own experience that when new enterprise project management tools are launched, there is a learning curve that makes it hard for people to embrace change with their whole being.
I would recommend that you start with a small, low-risk win rather than a full rollout for new PMO processes. Find and use an internal champion who already has credibility with the sceptics, and get them onboard for new ways of working. Let them talk about the value to their peers.
One of the processes I recommend regularly to mentees to start with is the project onboarding process – the activity to get a new project from ‘idea’ to ‘approved’. That can be messy and challenging, and streamlining it adds real value to the organization through:
- Better prioritization of human resources
- Better prioritization of financial resources
- Managing risk across a portfolio and not taking on too many high risk projects at once
- Managing expectations about what the team can actually achieve in this year/quarter.
Next, make the new way visibly easier, not just visibly ‘better practice’. So streamline the guidance, give people templates, make the right fields mandatory, share the prioritized list, and so on. This makes value visible, as well as making life easy for the people engaging with the PMO processes.
Finally, remember that some resistance is legitimate feedback about a clunky process! It’s not all problems to be overcome, so be willing to adjust rather than dig in and mandate what clearly isn’t working.
The PMO cheat sheet
One of the best managers I ever worked for had a one-page diagram of what our department did and how we added value, that he carried around to most meetings with him. We worked in a global headquarters, and honestly, it was pretty difficult to articulate how the team added value to the countries we supported, especially as they all had their own local project teams and internal communications teams.
But his diagram made the nebulous simple: you could see what we did, how we contributed to the organization’s values and how what we did supported the work elsewhere. We underpinned a lot of things, and the behind-the-scenes work was valuable. And the diagram showed how.
You could do the same. Make a single page you can hand to a new sponsor, a sceptical director, or use to prep for a five-minute leadership update.
Include:
- What the PMO does in one sentence (your service catalogue and/or mission statement)
- Three headline outcomes this quarter (in business language, not process language, this is how you add value)
- Portfolio health at a glance using key metrics, pulled from your single-version-of-the-truth
- One risk or ask that needs executive attention (if that’s relevant to the meeting you are going into).
Choosing the right message for the right stakeholder
When you are talking to stakeholders about the value, or creating materials where you need to implicitly big up the work of your team, tailor your message to the people you are talking to. Senior leaders will want headlines, whereas a delivery team will want to know how you can practically help them through coaching, templates and so on.
Also, consider that value is also relative to the audience, not absolute. People interpret value differently based on what they need from the PMO.
For example, an exec’s definition of PMO value (strategic alignment, confidence, no nasty surprises) is different from a project manager’s (less admin, someone removing blockers) which is different from Finance’s (forecasts they can trust).
Go back to your stakeholder list and make sure you have enough narrative to connect each of them to what they are getting from you – value isn’t just one thing, and only talking about the strategic alignment part means that you are missing out on showing your other stakeholders why they need you.
