Services

PMO Lab: Services

PMO Labs is our way of getting attendees talking about different PMO themes together. We know that every single one of the PMO Flashmobbers has a story to share, an interesting insight from their careers that others would get a great benefit from. In this PMO Lab, part of the session held at Parliament UK, we continued to look at the insights thrown up from the latest Inside PMO report on KPIs, Metrics and Measures. This time around we were talking about metrics around a PMO service menu - service levels or SLAs. We started by confirming what a service menu is. Basically, this is a list of all the services that the PMO can perform - the most well-known version of this is Appendix F of the P3O manual.
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Stop, Do More Of and Start in the PMO

Last month's PMO Flashmob was all about taking a look at our PMOs with a P3O lens. P3O, Portfolio, Programme and Project Offices, first created as a piece of guidance back in 2008 from the same stable as PRINCE2, and refreshed in 2013 is one of the more prominent literatures in this field. Many people within the PMO world have either read it or taken the step further and taken the training course and accreditation. One of the most prominent pieces of feedback has long been that P3O is a good place to start if you're setting up a PMO for the first time or indeed looking to reboot an existing one. What it has never done or claimed to do is set out how to manage a PMO or looked in any detail at the types of functions and services a PMO provides - and how to do them. We were lucky on Thursday night to have refresh author Eileen Roden run a session for us at QA's International House training venue (fabulous views BTW). We wanted to think about the world of PMO post P3O in so much that yes we have some good useful practice that is written and available but really we want to understand what has changed since 2008. We decided to have an interactive session in that PMO Flashmobbers would take a moment to stop and reflect. We asked the question: What has your PMO stopped doing?
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The PMO Debate – THIS HOUSE BELIEVES PMOs ARE IN DECLINE (For)

THIS HOUSE BELIEVES PMOs ARE IN DECLINE Before the debate started, we wanted to give the attendees a chance to think about the motion. Were they for it, against it, or undecided? Those against it felt that there was no evidence to support any decline, in fact there were more job advertisements for PMO, the publication of P3O and a feeling that PMO is in more demand especially in smaller companies. Those for the motion suggested that the PMO has become an organisation dumping ground, confusion on what it actually means, another layer of administration in a business and the PMO has an inability to define its value. For those sitting on the fence, it was their lack of experience of other PMOs that made them indecisive, there doesn't seem to be a baseline or consensus about PMOs, the definition differs everywhere.
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