"Augmenting" the PMO in a world on the move

By Nicolas GURGAND, Tuesday, December 7, 2021

Augmenting the PMO: make sense

In a rapidly accelerating society, the role of the Project Management Office has never been so vital in guiding major strategic decisions.

"Movement is the principle of all life". Leonardo da Vinci's phrase has never been more applicable to the business world than today. Remote working, digital communications, the explosion of disintermediation platforms, and more or less forced adaptation to new uses shaped by the health crisis are vivid examples.

The company's clock has never ticked so fast, faced with the need to protect a value chain that can be shaken up by major social changes, but can only be protected by continuously moving forward, adapting to the market, and anticipating new uses. In a word: constantly transforming itself.

In this context, while the first danger is immobility, the second is for complex organisations to be found inside the maze of a poorly controlled transformation project. By unnecessarily multiplying actors, abandoning any sense of rigour in selecting transformation projects, and an opaque or redundant organisation, any such loss of control runs a major risk of increasing entropy rather than reaching the desired goal.

That is why the company needs a genuine control centre, capable of selecting, centralising, and coordinating all projects, more from a strategic than an operational point of view. This is the whole purpose of PPM (Portfolio Project Management), often entrusted to a PMO (Project Management Office) that is more of an organisational entity than an isolated individual.

Sometimes unfairly confused with the "project manager", this project management office is positioned between top management and the entire spread of a company's projects. It is tasked with ensuring that these projects are properly executed, with coherent synergies, smooth execution, correctly allocated resources, and that fully transparent communication across the board.

This "control tower" dedicated to the supervision of all the company's projects takes on a more strategic dimension as projects start to multiply and become more complex and time-consuming.

Now that a company's sense of time is accelerating and requires permanent adaptation, PMOs must evolve into highly efficient units, capable of delivering the very best arbitrations at any moment.

By providing the right information to the right people in real time, monitoring the appropriate resource allocations, automating low value-added tasks, facilitating project management, and constantly securing commitment, EDWARD Suite aims to "augment" the traditional PMO in order to guarantee maximum efficiency, and contribute directly to the protection of the company's value chain.

Like to see how? We are here to listen. Just ask us for a demo!

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