PMO – Key to ensure Business IT alignment

According to Forrester, PMO has become the strategic center of IT. Various other surveys report that, IT Departments face great challenges in delivering the projects on time & budget. Surveys also show that organizations spend ~80% of IT budgets on tactical initiatives and only ~20% on strategic that are directly linked with business objectives.

To achieve more with the limited budget, organizations have no choice than cutting down the cost of tactical expenses to contribute more to strategic projects. This brings out the need to implement IT Governance. Key factors that influence focused IT Governance are:
• Better alignment between Business Objectives and IT
• Better control over internal processes and improved efficiency
• Increased need for identifying and mitigating risks
• Adherence to organization’s technology standards
• Metrics to measure IT performance
• Quick Adaptability for changing Business needs and technologies
• Statutory requirements like Sarbanes Oxley

In order to have a better handle on projects, majority of the organizations have felt the need of a body called ‘Project Management Office’ (PMO) that would hawk over IT projects and keep them away from all kinds of risks. Following are the key objectives of PMO:

• To ensure the projects are well-aligned with the Business Objectives
• To ensure that projects having more business value and less risk gets executed
• Building governance model for monitoring, control and compliance
• Enabling holistic view of all the projects to senior management
• Defining Qualitative & Quantitative Performance Metrics
• Enabling metrics based dashboards for better visibility and monitoring
• Plan & manage the change; the process change as well as the cultural change

Though the PMO team has crystal-clear understanding of their roles & responsibilities, following are the two main challenges that always impede the success:

• Lack of support from the Sr. Management in driving Governance initiatives
• Resistance from the end users. Most of the time there is a misconception that the committee is formed to find out peoples anomaly

In my last 15 years of experience, one thing that has always worked the best is – Communication – One pill for these ills. Communication is the key element here. Executive involvement to kick-off this initiative with right perspective into the objectives behind these initiatives is the first and important step that will ensure right support from the team.

Effective PMO implementation has the following benefits:

• It ensures that you are working on the right things
• It ensures that you are working the right way
• It promotes collaboration & drives prioritization
• It establishes standard processes and improves organization’s process level maturity
• It creates a governance model and ties people’s actions to the organization’s results
• It provides end-to-end visibility for informed decision-making
• It measures the performance of different projects as well as programs to monitor their progress, to avoid or reduce failure risks