A Project Management Office (PMO) is the administrative mechanism by which a focal point is provided for organizational project management activities.

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An effective project management office is aligned with the strategic planning goals of the organization and should be able to show visible value to the bottom-line.

 25 Reasons to Deploy a PMO

1. Capturing project requests and ensuring each request meets basic PMO requirements.
2. Keeping an up-to-date repository of projects underway and requests pending review.
3. Managing a resource forecast to help understand resource availability for projects.
4. Achieving in cost reduction through efficient, centralized services
5. Having a direct impact on the bottom-line of the organization by cutting cut project overruns.
6. Contributing to project quality assurance.
7. Improving IT and business efficiency in delivering projects consistently within time and budget.
8. Defining a set of project management standards, guidelines, and methods that can be used consistently throughout the organization by project and program managers.
9. Managing the shared portfolio, program and project management methodology and processes across the organization.
10. Ensuring the defined project management standards and procedures are followed.
11. Managing and facilitating the portfolio management process.
12. Implementing a scoring and prioritization model to assess which project requests should be approved.
13. Facilitating project portfolio management with a selection of projects to make sure the organization works on the right things at the right time.
14. Providing a centralized and consistent governance reporting model.
15. Ensuring that stakeholders have up-to-date, accurate information with a frequency and format they understand.
16. Providing big picture master project view to understand dependencies and risks.
17. Providing audit trails for large projects to ensure compliance with regulatory compliance.
18. Offering advice and support to project stakeholders.
19. Becoming a source of training, guidance, and mentoring for project managers.
20. Providing on-going services to make sure that problems stay solved.
21. Become the guardian of the project knowledge base.
22. Implement a program and project gating review process to make sure on-going compliance with business cases.
23. Centralized archive of lessons learned.
24. Provide consultancy on-demand to project stakeholders, sponsors, business owners, and IT owners
25. Implement a continuous improvement program for portfolio, program, project and resource management.

Editor’s Note: This post was originally published in June 2015 and has been updated for freshness, accuracy, and comprehensiveness.

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