Category: Professional Body
PMO Transformation Programme
As experts with decades of experience in PMO, we’re keen to share our learnings and best practices along the way. Take a look at our PMO strategic assessment framework, outlined below.
When managing a project, it’s important to start with an initial framework. Not only does this keep you on track, but it ensures that you don’t miss out any of the important project management steps along the way. Below is our PMO strategic assessment graphic, which demonstrates the framework that we use to successfully manage our projects.
Reviewing the relevance
- The first step is the strategic assessment, reviewing the relevance. This involves the first four steps on our graphic:
- Strategic purpose
- Principles and Governance
- Benefits
- Value
By identifying and understanding these core elements, you’ll be able to create a full picture of the project, and start to build a plan of action. Understanding the strategic purpose of a project allows you to understand the ‘big picture’, and the benefits and value aspects help you to understand the ‘why’ behind the project. This will help you and your team throughout the project lifecycle and during any decision making processes.
Reviewing the ‘how’
The next step is to review the ‘how’ – this is covered by step five and six on the graphic:
- PMO set-up, monitor and control
- PMO capabilities
Now you’ve got the foundation information available, it’s important to understand how the project is going to work. Are the right capabilities in place currently? Are there enough resources such as cost, time and staff? At this point, you’ll also need to set up your monitoring and control methods, creating benchmarking data as well as setting goals for the project as it progresses; this allows you to measure success.
Reviewing the ‘what’
The final step is understanding the ‘what’, as shown by steps seven and eight:
- Service management
- Services capabilities and capacity
This is where the strategy, design and implementation aspects come into play, and where the benchmarking and data capture from the second stage will help. This third and final stage is all about understanding the capabilities of both the wider project, and the smaller service groups along the way. The devil is in the detail – so it’s important to have this information available before making any big project decisions.