5 Signs your PMO Team is Under-performing
Setting up and working in a PMO isn’t always smooth sailing, and it doesn’t take much to rock the boat. As project managers, we know how easy it is to miss warning signs in our PMO. To help you with this, we’ve compiled the most common red flags that indicate your PMO isn’t working as it should.
Here’s the top 5 PMO Red flags, and how you can rectify them.
1: Lack of tangible data
We all know that PMO member who suggests unrealistic ideas, and justifies them by their past experience. If you have a teammate who has confidence rather than evidence backing their proposals, that’s a red flag to address.
PMOs are a dynamic space that requires we to adapt to new situations, technology, and opportunities. As a result, we can’t solely rely on our past experience to validate decisions. Rather, we must refer to data, evaluations, and estimations- tangible data.
This becomes particularly important when there is a large amount of funds running through your team. You need tangible evidence to back your claims, and to ensure you reach the results expected. Oftentimes, the PMO is a stabiling force in organisations. Therefore, your projects and activities need to be based on data which ensures they are stable and reaching targets.
Now this doesn’t mean we should stop new ideas and experiments just because they don’t have any prior data. PMO leaders can validate new ideas by utilising the technology and estimation software we have access to. Tangible data is not reliant on past data. It can also be based off evidence from other organisations, or accurate estimates. Evidence has the foundations of data collection and effective application of the data you have.
Position your team to be a data-based and evidence-backed PMO.
2: Neglecting your strategic function
Is your PMO running on auto-pilot? Are they focused on collecting data and building reports, and less on being a strategic arm in the organisation?
A report by Forrester suggests that PMOs are becoming too busy to be truly strategic. The results of this survey showed 75% of PMOs were doing hands-on project management activities. Putting together reports and keeping projects on track is essential, but these efforts don’t contribute to the PMO’s strategic function. They won’t translate to effective long-term change and growth. So, your PMO might have to re-evaluate their tasks and workload.
What makes PMOs unique is their many abilities across different levels of the organisation. They are expected to coordinate business strategy across a spectrum of business activities. At the same time, they should identify opportunities and bring stakeholders on board. These roles propel the business to start meeting its full potential.
Always remember that a PMO is intrinsically strategic. That means, if PMO red flags around strategy appear, it’s detrimental to your team and other business activities.
3: Unclear goal, mission, and focus
Is your team always rushing into planning and executing new plans? It might look like your team is getting busy. However, there is a subtle difference between being busy and being productive.
Your PMO can be executing new and seemingly exciting things. If, however, there isn’t an underlying goal, the new activities won’t get you closer to genuine results.
Your PMO should be working closely together with C-Suite leaders to align themselves with the strategy driving the business forward. A PMO team that can confidently translate, communicate, and execute their strategy boosts the credibility of the PMO. In addition, it also keeps the PMO team constantly aware of their central focus.
You can check if your activities are aligned with strategy by questioning the ‘why’ behind every action and plan.
4: Your team is not adapting fast enough
Change is always scary. So, sometimes it can seem wise to stick to tried-and-trusty processes. However, avoiding change can be of the most dangerous red flags in your team.
A Gartner report suggest that by 2030, 80% of our current project management activities will be taken over by AI. However, advanced PMOs are embracing this change and intentionally putting themselves at the forefront. By preparing your PMO to take advantage of changing technologies, you are positioning yourselves competitively for the future.
There’s always new innovations, practices, and models popping up in the PMO space that can improve your PMO. If you start noticing your team is focusing on the inconveniences and dangers of new opportunities rather than their potential, you might need to address your team’s mentality.
5: Breakdown in Communication
We can’t emphasise enough that communication is one of the most essential soft skills for a PMO. Though it might seem obvious, not every PMO team communicates effectively.
Some PMOs fall into the trap of believing that weekly reports suffice for communication with stakeholders. Even though these reports may pass on relevant information, communication is more than an exchange of data. Instead, a communication is also about building trust.
Forrester’s report shows that only 58% of stakeholder believe information from their PMOs is realistic. For the PMO to be effective, there needs to be trust and investment in the PMOs activities and needs. Numbers alone aren’t going to get your strategy and vision to your stakeholders.
If you spot your team members not joining team meetings and not meeting up with other divisions, you might need to address those issues. PMOs should never be too busy to communicate, because the PMO manages people, not just numbers. People are your best asset, so make sure you’re investing time and effort to bring out the best from them.
Learn More PMO Best Practices!
To learn about how to improve your PMO, and become a more effective project manager, check out our blog. Reach out to our PPM experts if you are interested in how to choose a PPM solution for your organisation!
IIR: Introduce, Integrate, Replace
Step 01
Introduce
You cannot run a portfolio on Excel and PowerPoint alone.
Project portfolio management is the discipline of seeing every project in one place, prioritising the work that matters, allocating people against demand, and governing delivery with real numbers. It is not optional at any serious scale. The moment you have more projects than one person can hold in their head, you need a single, current view of status, schedule, cost, resource and risk.
Excel and PowerPoint feel free because there is no licence conversation. The real cost is elsewhere. It is the hours spent maintaining workbooks, the version confusion, and the numbers that go stale the moment they are pasted.
A spreadsheet cannot tell you, on demand, which projects are at risk, where your people are over-committed next quarter, or how much of the portfolio budget is actually spent.
Introducing a proper PPM platform is the first step. Not to add another tool for its own sake, but to give the portfolio one place where the data lives together and stays live.
Step 02
Integrate
The instinct after buying a PPM platform is to make everyone move into it. That is the fastest way to fail. Project managers already have tools they trust, and finance already has systems of record. Force a migration on day one and you get resistance, shadow spreadsheets, and a dataset nobody believes.
Integrate first. Meet the data where it already is. Two directions matter.
Direction 01
Enterprise systems
Connect to the finance or ERP layer so actuals, commitments and budgets flow in automatically. Reporting stops being a monthly reconciliation and becomes a live view. Nobody rekeys a spend figure again.
Direction 02
The tools PMs already use
The direction most platforms neglect, and arguably the more important. The portfolio should read from the PM's own tools, not force people to abandon them.
The reason this matters is simple. That data is already there, and it is kept current by the person closest to it. When the portfolio reads directly from these sources, the status report updates itself. No chasing, no copy and paste, no reporting lag. The PM keeps working the way they always have, and the board gets a live picture as a side effect.
Step 03
Replace
Integration buys you two things: trust, and live data. Once both are in place, you look at what can go.
Every organisation carries tools and spreadsheets that either do not do the job well or carry a heavy maintenance overhead. The classic example is the resource spreadsheet. It is a workbook someone maintains by hand to track who is on what. It is always slightly out of date, owned by one person, and impossible to reconcile against real demand.
Replace it with the equivalent function in your PPM.
A proper demand management capability does what the spreadsheet was reaching for, with none of the overhead. It models demand against capacity across the whole portfolio, updates as projects shift, and needs no manual upkeep.
Replace deliberately, one function at a time, and only after the platform has earned it. The test is simple: if a spreadsheet is high overhead or low quality, and the platform does the same job natively, retire the spreadsheet.
The payoff
You stop producing reports and start reading them
Follow IIR and the nature of reporting changes. The status view is current because it is fed by the tools people already use and the systems that already hold the money. The overhead that used to consume the last week of every month disappears, because there is nothing to assemble.
That is the whole point of real-time reporting. Not a prettier deck, but a portfolio you can look at any day of the month and trust, at a fraction of the effort it takes today.
Built on Microsoft 365. Native ground for IIR.
pmo365 integrates with the tools your teams already run in, so the path from Introduce to Integrate to Replace is a natural progression rather than a rip and replace.