The purpose of a PMO is not to develop practices for how you manage projects. Then what is it?

July 6, 2012 - PRLog -- Interview Transcript:

Samir Penkar: Well, welcome to the future of project management. We’re in Minneapolis here. We are with Mark Price Perry and he is the senior vice president and founder of BOT International. He’s written books and he has some great ideas on PMOs and we’re going to talk to him today. Thank you, Mark, for doing this.

Mark Perry: Thank you for inviting me. It’s a pleasure to finally meet you.

Samir Penkar: Yes, it is. Mark, do you want to start off by telling us maybe a story about a PMO that converted to this business-driven approach and the kind of benefits they got out of it?

Mark Perry: Gosh, I could give a lot of examples of stories over the years but my favorite one is a story of a small software company where the leadership team decided they wanted to have a PMO because the software company had grown. Their problems were one of success and they realized that the innovation and approaches to the management of business that served them well as a new start could not scale in support of their future growth so they needed to operationalize the best practices and behaviors.

Specifically in a PMO company context, they were very interested to get a better grasp of the projects of the company both internal projects, development, infrastructure, and external projects that were the professional services implementation projects that they had with clients for which the billable revenue of the professional services projects plus about 50% of their business’s line.

In this story the leadership team considered the idea of a PMO. They never had a PMO before. They interviewed a bunch of candidates and the first candidate that they interviewed was very, very talented. The second candidate that they interviewed was also very talented. Those two candidates made the final short list.

Now, the first candidate was a certified PMP, had been a PMO manager at other companies. They liked his profile and professional experience quite a bit and felt that who better than and experienced PMO manager to do a PMO for an organization that never had one. The second PMO manager was extremely well versed and had deep business acumen in the type of lines that this company had in terms of sales, marketing, professional services, support, product marketing, but this person had never been a PMO manager before.

Read the rest of the interview at http://futureofprojectmanagement.com