The PMO advantage

The PMBOK Guide defines the PMO concept as "an organizational unit to centralize and coordinate the management of projects under its domain." In the last 30 years, more and more large organizations across all industries have begun to setup their own PMOs. Although many PMOs have characteristics unique to the industries that they serve, there are similar underlying economic advantages to all of them. Here are a few of the advantages that have been frequently cited.

Best practices consolidated

Setting up a PMO allows an organization to pull together its institutional knowledge. Cases unique to the organization are able to be analyzed and best practices can be developed. For many organizations, this advantage will be the most difficult to achieve due to the sheer volume of projects that have preceded the creation of the PMO. This consolidation of inside know how and best practices are now available to new projects.

Up to date best practices

An active PMO will constantly be evaluating industry best practices and distilling that knowledge into checklists, workflows, work breakdown structures, frameworks, etc… all the artifacts required to run a project. Feedback from ongoing or closed projects is fed-back into the PMO to further improve the organizational knowledge base. This reduces the time required by individual project managers to seek out best practices related to their field or industry.

Consistency

In-experienced (and experienced alike) project managers who develop work breakdown structures and other project artifacts from scratch will create a different set of artifacts than another of his peer would give the same project. This inconsistency across an organization makes it expensive (or impossible) to extract project level metrics to guide quality, budget and timing discussions. A PMO determines a minimal set of crucial artifacts that each project will have.

Career path for project managers

Project managers in transition from projects that have just closed, or newly on-boarded project managers will be prepared by the PMO for their next assignment. This creates a seamless career path for project managers. The consolidated experience in managing and recruiting project managers at the PMO level will improve the quality of recruiting future project managers.

Continuity

Life events affect project managers just like any other employees. This means that there could be one or more project managers over the lifetime of a project. A PMO creates a pool of experienced project managers who can seamlessly step in to manage a project should the need arise.

Audit of controls and processes

Maintaining the same high level of quality across a large organization requires the best practices gathered by the PMO to be audited and compared to other PMOs. A single source of knowledge within a firm will reduce the time required to audit a range of artifacts.