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In this session we take a look at the award-winning PMO at GCHQ and learn about their PMO transformation.
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Each year we published the trends we think will have an impact on PMOs for the coming year, these are the trends for 2022.
In this session, we asked our lodgers to share their own insights based on the trends this year.
In the recording, you'll hear about some of their choices - including the centre of excellence; new working practices, citizen developer, the hybrid challenge and resilience.
Hopefully, it will give you some different insights into each of those areas - plus watch out for the gorilla!
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Demand Management is all about how we manage the flow of work in projects - from new project requests; change requests; new ideas and so on.
The eBook gives you some food for thought in terms of what the PMO can be doing to support the flow.
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DevOps is a combination of software development (Dev) and IT operations (Ops) and is focused on continuous delivery. An example would be an ever-evolving financial or business app – there is no end date as such. Another way of looking at it is not so much project management as product management.
DevOps is not an area that PMO Flashmob has explored in any great detail but we have so many questions.
What are the differences between project and product management?
What challenges are there with DevOps work and teams?
What are some of the main areas the PMO needs to be thinking about if we are to support DevOps teams and work?
What stays the same and what changes in the PMO?
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In July 2020, the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA), a government organisation, released a white paper which focused on eight principles, "a quick guide for practitioners on things to get right for any project to succeed"
The IPA is the UK government’s centre of expertise for infrastructure and major projects and is aligned with the Cabinet Office and the Treasury.
If you've not seen the paper, take a look at it here. We were specifically interested in what the principles for project success are and take another look at the PMO Principles in light of them. The challenge for PMOs is also how to embed and ingrain these principles within our organisations.
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The Infrastructure and Projects Authority’s (IPA) have an initiative called Project X.
Project X is
a vehicle to engage contemporary research in project and programme with the ‘real-world’ issues that are manifest across the Government’s Major Project Portfolio (GMPP). Project X is ambitious, it seeks to promote and support methodologically rigorous research that is firmly grounded in clear pathways to impact – with an ultimate ambition of delivering savings for the project delivery and enhancing project management capability across government departments and industry.
As part of the initiative, different organisations are taking part and making contributions, the Association for Project Management (APM) is one of them and a recent report called Developing the Practice of Governance - was released.
The report focuses on how project practitioners could improve governance on their projects and of course, that's a subject that should interest any PMO practitioner too.
As part of the weekly #PMOwfh session, we had one of the authors of that report join us. It sparked some really interesting and new insights which we think you'll enjoy exploring too.
Let's get started
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The last full PMO Flashmob meetup we had was back in March which was also a virtual one, was all about PMO services for Agile and Waterfall projects.
Here's the overview:
Many PMOs do not have the luxury of focussing solely on Waterfall or Agile projects.
Their challenge is to evolve their service offering to support the Waterfall projects, whilst juggling an increasing number of Agile projects in the portfolio.
During this session, John McIntyre of HotPMO will talk us through how PMOs can rise to the challenge and become delivery heroes! He’ll share practical wisdom and useful insights that will help you and your organisation achieve tangible outcomes from your investment in agile: delivering fast & increasing transparency whilst avoiding common pitfalls.
Sound like something your PMO is facing right now?
Take a look at the session (just over an hour):
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I held a careers coaching session the other day for someone looking to get into a project co-ordination role for the first time. I'm conscious that a lot of the PMO Flashmob topics and themes at events might not be newbie friendly and perhaps we should look into doing something like this in the future.
What made me write this article was that some of the things that came up in the career session would be beneficial for other people too.
You might be reading this as an experienced PMO practitioner, in which case, great! Make sure you add any other tips to the comments at the bottom - plus also point any newbies you meet to this article so you can help them out too. So this article is for someone looking to get into project co-ordination for the first time. It assumes two things; they've got some experience working within an office or business environment of some sort already. Not project related, just any office experience. Two; this is about getting into supporting a project for the first time, not a PMO role (that will come later)
I'm also going to share some resources to other places too.
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PMO Learning’s Eileen Roden presented a session at the British Computer Society (BCS) The Chartered Institute of IT’s offices in Covent Garden, London. We've added this session to the PMO Flashmob website because we think you might like the content.
There are two parts to this session:
First the role an effective PMO can play in driving and supporting successful delivery, from setting up the organisation’s delivery infrastructure and ecosystem to pure administrative support (and everything in-between). It also covered how project managers engage with the PMO and identified how best the PMO can help, within the context of their other roles across the organisation.
Second, the session also looked at some of the challenges when dealing with PMOs (particularly an ineffective PMO) and explored strategies and tactics to get the best from them.
The BCS PROMS-G event is the meetup for project management practitioners working in IT [ you can take a look at other events they run here]
The event saw attendance fom both project managers and PMO practitioners and Eileen’s session focused on a couple of things. First the role an effective PMO can play in driving and supporting successful delivery, from setting up the organisation’s delivery infrastructure and ecosystem to pure administrative support (and everything in-between). It also covered how project managers engage with the PMO and identified how best the PMO can help, within the context of their other roles across the organisation. Second the session also looked at some of the challenges when dealing with PMOs (particularly an ineffective PMO) and explored strategies and tactics to get the best from them.
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