Metrics and Measures

Tracking the PMO’s Performance

It’s a member’s question that has led to creating this session – ‘how can you track the PMO’s performance?’ We explore the fundamental metrics that define a PMO's success and understand how these metrics align with PPM and organisational goals.
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Agile Reporting and Metrics

We start off with some individual project reporting and the common reports you are likely to create. We spent some time looking at some examples and actually reading those, understanding what the graphs are actually telling us. Most of these reports are based on SCRUM so you'll find mentioned here burndowns, velocity, burnups etc The second part of the session turned to the reporting and metrics that happen at the portfolio and more strategic levels. We looked at strategy and investment funding; reporting at a portfolio level and looked at OKRs - which are commonly used in scaled agile. The session also touched on value streams.
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Balanced Scorecards and the PMO

Balanced Scorecards are used by organisations to help develop their strategies and measure how effective those strategies are. For an in-depth look, you can head over to the Balanced Scorecard Institute.  In this article, we take a look at how a balanced scorecard approach was utilised by a PMO within the education sector and see what insights will be useful to other PMOs regardless of the sector that PMO can be found in. The insights come from a research paper - Measuring PMO Performance – Application of the Balanced Scorecard in a Collaborative Research Context - from Philbin and Kaur (2020) available from the Journal of Modern Project Management.
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Goal Setting for PMO Teams

We often get asked about metrics and measures for the PMO. You might already be aware of the Inside PMO Report we have which is focused on this subject. There’s a difference between the metrics and measures that the PMO contributes to – such as project success rates and the ones which focus on how well the PMO services are received by the organisation. There is one other area too that tends to get overlooked, and that’s the metrics and measures of the PMO team itself – is the team meeting the objectives and goals of the organisation. There is a specific goal system that can be used: OKRs (that’s objectives and key results to you and me) have been popular with tech start-ups for years and they seem to have hit the mainstream with more and more organisations adopting the OKR approach to goal and direction setting. OKRs aren’t just for Silicon Valley, they can be a great tool for PMOs to clearly define what they and the portfolios they support are setting out to achieve – and how the goals of the PMO align with the goals of the organisation. Do you know your KRs from your KPIs? Are your goals likely to have people saying O-wow!… or simply O-dear? John McIntyre from HotPMO helped us explore what OKRs are and how they can be used to align and accelerate PMO performance. Login to see the session; the deck, the writeup and the insights:
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