PMO Basics: What 85% of PMOs Do

Last week I had a great opportunity to catch up with Terry Doerscher in London. Terry was over in the UK running a portfolio management workshop with BOT many of you might know Terry from the PMO 2.0 survey and reports from Planview. He’s also written the book Taming Change which is all about portfolio management. I’ll be posting up my thoughts about the workshop next week but before looking at portfolio level PMOs I wanted to share some insights from the latest PMO 2.0 survey (which can be accessed here) about the most common services a PMO provides.

85% of PMOs in organisations today do the following eight things:

• Gather and distribute information
• Manage demand (people and money)
• Reporting and analytics
• Coordination and collaboration
• Issues and opportunities
• Capacity Management
• Processes and tools
• Specialised expertise and consulting

Terry Doerscher and I in London last week

The interesting thing for me is so if 85% of PMOs are providing these kinds of services, what does the % percentage of work load look like for these areas across a given month. It seems that the vast majority of PMOs and the people who work within them that I come across would probably state that over 50% of their workload is probably reporting and analytics, with specialised expertise and consulting a lowly 1%. There’s nothing scientific about my guesstimate, but I would be really interested to see what it is in reality (*hmm I can feel a little poll coming on*).

[ad#banner]