PMO - a working concept

It's time to pause and summarise what we have outlined so far.  I have outlined a working concept of PMO that I trust that we can use to build a basic PMO framework, in the posts that follow.  The framework will be flexible enough to allow any type of PMO, and any practitioner, to optimise the particular setup they find themselves in.

The building blocks of the concept are:

• we are dealing with projects that are executed in a corporate environment, as a way of managing change
• for projects to return a margin on investment consistently, they need to run in a controlled environment
• focused governance of change makes the project environment efficient at delivery, while maintaining the alignment required by the organisation
• the PMO is an attribute of the organisation, the business as a whole, that brings together the critical elements of that organisation's project environment
• it can be defined in many ways and be implemented as multiple units at different levels (project, programme, portfolio), as long as all units share a common framework

I stress the building blocks to make sure that the subtler and rarely addressed elements are not lost in a simplistic definition.

To summarise:

The PMO consist of a unit or set of units dedicated to the governance of change within an organisation. The specific form and function of a given PMO should be dictated by the nature of the project environment that it needs to control.