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What is a project management office (PMO)?

A project management office (PMO) sets and maintains your organization's project management best practices—including defining how your organization executes core processes and strategic initiatives. A PMO can be an internal team or an external support system. 

Internal vs. external PMOs

An internal PMO is an in-house team that supports project success. Internal PMOs are permanent teams that collect all of your organization’s processes to establish standards and best practices. These teams are tasked with:

  • Providing trainings

  • Updating guidelines

  • Standardizing and maintaining best practices

  • Supporting change management initiatives

Alternatively, an external project management office is an agency or consulting group that helps you create best practices for your company. External PMOs:

  • Intake processes and suggest optimized best practices

  • Do not enforce those practices or continue supporting your organization 

The type of PMO you invest in depends on your organization’s unique needs. However, an internal PMO is generally better equipped to support your organization in the long term. In this article, we’ll talk about the roles, responsibilities, challenges, and benefits of an internal PMO. 

PMO roles and responsibilities

A PMO helps you standardize project management processes across the business. They do that by putting best practices and guidelines in place for your team. PMOs:

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  • Get teams on the same page: Schedule a project kickoff meeting to go over scope, deliverables, timelines, and roles.  

  • Establish who’s in charge: Define clear ownership between project leads, budget owners, and other stakeholders.

  • Standardize tools: Create templates for projects and project briefs.

  • Develop guidelines: Outline best practices for how project milestones are set and how project health is communicated.

  • Design reporting processes: Standardize how project status is reported.

  • Set expectations: Set clear expectations around project planning, execution, reports.

 

With a PMO in place, teams know exactly what’s expected of them so they can complete projects efficiently and on time. These roles and responsibilities can be summarized by the following categories.

What are the three types of PMOs?

  1. Supportive PMO: Focuses on providing mentoring, training, information, and support—without being too prescriptive. Supportive PMOs will often provide suggestions and structure for projects,but allow each project manager to decide whether they want to adopt those suggestions or not.

  2. Controlling PMO: Most beneficial if you need to reign in processes and ensure every team is marching to the same beat. Unlike a supportive PMO, a controlling PMO will standardize guidelines and expect project managers to follow those guidelines effectively. Controlling PMOs may also review projects to ensure they’re compliant. 

  3. Directive PMO: Takes over the project management elements and coordinates most project planning details like resource allocation, project risk management, and project scoping. Because the PMO is effectively running most large initiatives, these project management offices tend to staff the most people.  

Benefits of a PMO

The biggest benefit of a PMO is gaining the tools to standardize systems and processes. When everyone on your team is in sync, you lower the barrier to cross-functional collaboration and unlock higher-impact work. 

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This is simultaneously one of the most challenging things to tackle as a PMO and one of the main reasons PMOs are used in the first place. Over time, teams and departments naturally develop their own processes. In order to get their best work done, each team implements its own standards, technologies, and project management tools. But because they’re only adopting processes and tools that meet their specific team’s needs, this can quickly create information silos and knowledge gaps. 

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Left unchecked, these silos lead to operational inefficiencies and make cross-functional coordination challenging. 

In addition to helping teams get their best work done, a PMO:

  • Aligns projects to corporate strategy, connecting daily work to company goals

  • Enables cross-functional collaboration by standardizing systems

  • Fosters strategic decision-making through project governance

  • Establishes organization-wide project management standards

  • Shares real-time visibility and context between teams

  • Develops, shares, and monitors project management best practices across your organization

  • Trains new project managers or teaches new project management skills

  • Integrates and democratizes data throughout your organization

  • Increases operational efficiency by standardizing and streamlining processes

  • Improves resource utilization by establishing a resource management plan

  • Reduces time and cost spent on projects

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