From the course: How to Successfully Lead a PMO

Overseeing projects, programs, and portfolios

From the course: How to Successfully Lead a PMO

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Overseeing projects, programs, and portfolios

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- Here is a reality check. Everyone's happy when your PMO is doing well. But with that happiness comes a greater level of expectation. You and your PMO are now expected to deliver larger, more complex projects that span across many more areas of organization that you use to. Challenge accepted. Absolutely. Some of these projects might be interrelated, building on one another and sharing a common goal. This set of projects is referred to as a program. Let's say a company builds commercial properties in Europe. The construction of each property is a project, the building of several properties in London, Prague and Barcelona are city specific programs. And a collection of projects and programs is known as a portfolio. So your company could have Eastern and Western European portfolios, including the projects and programs of the regions Eastern and Western cities respectively. To manage programs, you might hire program managers to oversee the success of their project managers and the program as a whole. And either you are the PMO leader, or designated portfolio managers are placed to take care of the portfolios. How do you work with program and portfolio managers so that all of your projects are collectively positioned for success. Knowing respecting set boundaries is critical. A program managers is responsible for the success of his program and a portfolio manager for her portfolio. You as the PMO leader are accountable for their success. You've set the base standards, governance and execution expectations. The program and portfolio managers follow them. But they should be given the free hand to make tweaks to the processes, add additional layers of complexity, or bring in some other tools as needed. I remember being part of a highly visible program at a leading Canadian pharmacy. A program manager has set up the program's own PMO based on the pharmacy's organizational wide PMO. The organizational wide PMO leader, met the program manager regularly, getting high level progress details and seeing if you could help remove any roadblocks. Equally important to note was that the organizational wide PMO leader was not involved into the day to day aspects of the program. When your PMO grows to this level of success, you recognize that it's impossible for you, the PMO leader to be involved in so many projects and to provide that required level of support to so many project managers. Instead, you're focused on supporting your portfolio, program and handful of product managers, while working to provide the right level of insights and decisions of these initiatives to your executive leadership. This is the new reality for you as the leader of growing PMO. You have to embrace it to thrive. Otherwise, you risk getting in the way of your own PMO success.

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