23 Ways How PMO Can Help to Accelerate Business Growth

What is a Project Management Office (PMO)?

A project management office is your in-house group or department that is tasked with the responsibility of establishing and maintaining project management standards within your organization.

The PMO’s primary goal is to increase the overall productivity throughout your business by producing high-quality project outcomes while maximizing the returns on investments.

The functions of a PMO team are customized and specific to an organization’s focus, culture, priorities, background, and organizational influences, but one thing remains constant: they will most certainly help accelerate your business growth.

 How Can PMO Help me to Accelerate the Business Growth?

Take a look at these 23 breath-taking ways through which getting a Project Management Office will accelerate your business growth!

1. Increased Accuracy

To accomplish your projects spectacularly, you have to be accurate with your budget, resources, and associated schedules. A PMO comes in handy in increasing the accuracy of your projects.

They reduce the chances of having major hiccups or failures throughout the implementation of the projects.

Establishing consistent patterns and constantly checking to see the path the projects are taking will save you from having to wait till the completion of a project to determine the level of success.

Accurately carrying out the tasks of the individual milestones that make up the overall project is the key to exceeding the set expectations for your project.

2. Cost and Budget Management

The trickiest part of managing numerous projects is keeping up with budget constraints. A Project Management Office saves you costs as they execute accuracy throughout all the stages of the project.

Managing your budget throughout the different milestones ensures you do not run out of money meant for the project before its actual completion.

A close look at the accuracy of your implementation process saves you the trouble of having to make adjustments at multiple points throughout the execution phase.

Sticking to the initial plan means you do not get to incur additional costs before the successful completion of your projects.

3. Standardization

A Project Management Office collects data, conducts analysis, reports, and creates reports, all of which are used to standardize the project processes.

The office ensures that your organization develops and enforces standards across the board, which leads to improvement in the project management expertise and uniformity across your project teams.

A standard way of conducting your projects ensures you will not have major loopholes through which your projects are stalled or put on hold. It helps you avoid having to deal with major uncertainties, especially when undertaking new projects.

4. Better Understanding

Standardization leads to understanding across different teams, particularly when it comes to establishing synchrony among the different milestones.

From the standardization of your projects, your PMO will standardize the different practices so that you are saved from the trouble of having different project managers in different parts of your organization using different milestones.

A PMO will introduce universally understood milestones across your organization, which will avoid misunderstandings on the level at which a given department refers to the project as done just when it cannot be submitted to the client just yet.

5. Credible and Fast Decision Making

Project management heavily involves making delicate decisions, most of which need to be made fast enough to keep up with the stipulated timelines.

Your PMO office provides you with a platform for good decision making by linking up the outlined strategic plans with the other corporate results. The nature of your projects needs to be in line with your organization’s business plan and strategies.

Your project teams will really use the help from a PMO so that the decisions made, especially in situations of extreme pressure, are what is best for your business to achieve the desired goals.

Universally understood milestones across your business would rid the different people handling different aspects of your projects of the misunderstandings that would have otherwise cropped up.

6. Project Control

The level of project control exerted by your management team determines if your project is achieved within the given timeframe and stipulated budget. At times your management team is overwhelmed by running the general aspects of your business.

A PMO will prove extremely useful for your business in exerting control over your projects through its set processes, procedures, and enhanced communication channels.

The increased level of project control will help your business achieve the set strategic goals and objectives. This will allow your organization to achieve more success in carrying out your projects.

7. Resource Assistance

Tackling your projects successfully requires intensive resources, and most often, resourcing issues prove difficult at some point throughout the implementation stages of the projects.

Having a Project Management Office will help you accelerate your business growth strategies. It will sort out all your issues and needs for resources.

The key component of your project management is in the skills set and strengths of your project manager. A PMO will help you allocate the ideal manager to the ideal project, which gives you an upper hand in executing all your projects successfully within the budget and time constraints.

8. Support

Your high-level management team needs consistent support, and your PMO will give them just that. A PMO has an overall view and perspective of your organization’s portfolio of different projects.

It will therefore support the management team by providing them with relevant information on different areas such as planning and control that will offer them backing throughout the projects’ duration.

Your PMO will propel your business growth stages by seeking to bring in the sense of organization and repetition to projects and the teams responsible for them.

9. Improve your Project’s Visibility

Your PMO will achieve visibility through the leaders, and this allows them to transparently anticipate the risks associated with your project outcomes. This will be the most helpful task that your PMO fulfills by using visibility to get everyone aligned behind the real-time facts.

Having a touch of what is truly happening, that affects the outcome of your projects in real-time will ensure you are more aligned to your overall project management goals. Visibility into the portfolio allows all stakeholders of your different projects to be on the same page.

It makes it possible for your project managers to illustrate the intricate details of the inner workings of the projects and where the major bottlenecks are, to the executives, efficiently.

10. Achieve Predictability

Your PMO brings economies of repetition to all projects embarked on within your business. From the repetition, the PMO will increase the planning accuracy of your projects in terms of resources, budget, and schedule.

Increased project predictability will make the initial investment case for the projects you undertake more accurate, which in turn increases the levels of success attained. It will also make the teams functioning downstream from the project team (such as the client engagement team) operate more consistently.

The main source of client satisfaction is delivering the project on the agreed time. Increased project predictability means that the client engagement team does not have to keep recalibrating the clients’ expectations since they will most certainly be met.

11. Improved Project Estimation Process

Numerous factors influence the outcome of your projects. Upfront planning and estimation are the two critical factors that determine the long term success of your projects. However, most businesses do not attach the necessary value to the estimation process. No wonder clients are disappointed when a project always takes longer than the agreed time.

Project estimation will propel your strategies for business growth by helping the individuals and project managers, as well as the executives, achieve the ultimate customer satisfaction for your clients. It provides you with a consistent method of estimating the resourcing and expenditure levels of your projects throughout your business.

Your PMO will implement a simple form of project estimation from which you can easily understand the impact of a project on resource capability as well as the financial impact on your operating budgets.

It will accelerate your business growth through the standardization of your sales department and the interaction of your project managers with your customers and work quotations.

The end result will be an overall positive impact on the productivity of your business, achieved customer satisfaction as well as the number of projects that you can deliver on time and within the stipulated budgets.

12. Select and Prioritize the Right Projects

Business growth, when it comes to project management, is closely linked to your selection and order of priorities in the different aspects of a specific project, as well as weighing the options between different projects.

Your PMO will help you to prioritize project related work against each other to determine the most sensible and optimized order of work.

It is an essential aspect of any growing business. Making use of the scarcest resources to maximize benefits while removing any project failure, which is certainly a huge challenge in project management, will provide your business with the greatest benefit.

Project selection and prioritization will enhance your ability to quickly and easily assess the potential return of your project investments against the resource and expenditure involvements and potential risk.

Your PMO will be helping you accelerate your business growth by guiding you to make carefully calculated moves.

13. Plan Your Projects in a Repeatable Manner

The planning process and period just before the commencement of your projects are crucial in determining the successful delivery of your project. Project planning provides you with a simple and easy method to help your business plan the tasks, roles, responsibilities, activities, and deliverables required by each project effectively.

Your PMO will offer clear planning for your projects in a consistent manner to help you avoid the disappointment of failed or overdue projects.

The office will reduce the risks involved and provide you with exact timings and actionable decision points to ensure your projects are delivered on-time and to the set budget.

14. Increase your Teams’ Consistency

Your PMO will own and maintain the best practices throughout your projects and will ensure that all the procedures are maintained. From the consistency achieved by the project management office, your teams will not have to reinvent the wheel when dealing with each project.

The teams will have a standing approach to leverage on how to go about the different projects.

In the event any team is at a crossroad, the PMO will offer guidance on the best way to move forward.

15. Hold Your Teams Accountable

It is easy to get sidetracked when a project team is fully involved with the dynamics of a complex project. Someone from the PMO will provide the much needed outside perspective to keep the teams on track.

The project management office will protect your teams’ focus in terms of the project goals, timelines, and deliverables, making sure the project stays on schedule.

16. Stay Nimble

Seizing a new opportunity or taking a different direction demands that you are agile and able to change course on the fly. Such situations require you to know the status of different projects to identify which ones should be put on hold.

A PMO provides you with regular reporting on the progress of different projects, and this will help accelerate your business growth by offering you the help you need to inform strategic decisions.

17. Share Knowledge Across Your Teams

Throughout the execution of different projects, teams will always learn something new as they work their way through a problem. Just within your business, a different team could be facing the same problem that another team has just worked so hard to solve.

Your PMO will help your team that may be struggling with a similar challenge with valuable information.

A PMO will help you centralize your teams’ learning. It will make it easier to share and distribute knowledge, tools, techniques, and industry insights.

18. Analyze Your Performance Data

You can leverage the PMO’s data on projects’ success to tap into the enterprise-wide insights on performance. You are able to track the different teams, projects, project length, and time of year to identify the pattern in performance trends.

The specialization will help you steer business growth by knowing which teams are better suited for certain project types.

19. Improve Your Learning Process

You can tap the knowledge acquired by your PMO to promote best practices within your business.

Your PMO could make a presentation on project management topics or perhaps come up with a project management newsletter that offers tips and reminders.

20. Stay Up to Date on Best Practices

One of the primary roles of your PMO is to stay up on the best project management practices. They will attend conferences, read the latest publics from your industry, and network with peers.

This way, they keep the project management team up to date on the best standards as well as feed them with the latest and greatest achievements or recordings from the project management community.

21. Tap the Knowledge of an External Vendor

Your project management office does not have to be internal. You can work with an external company to handle the duties of a PMO within your business. Such an arrangement provides you with more of an outsider’s perspective.

Such a view helps your business counteract the normal groupthink and avoid the blind spots. An external PMO is also insulated from internal politics and will offer you an objective perspective.

22. Keep the Main Business the Main Business

Your projects will often pull together people from different areas of your organization. Such people are likely to have different priorities, managers, and working methods.

Your PMO will help your project managers to keep everyone communicating and mediate the different perspectives to keep everyone moving forward and protect the interest of the projects.

23. Encourage and Facilitate Team Collaboration

One of the most significant PMO benefits is to help your teams recognize that working together will help them accomplish more.

Appreciating the place of unity will ensure that individuals in different teams do not continue to pursue their own objectives that may be loosely tied to the project or the organizational objectives.

Your PMO will help your project team members to work together in synergy and share knowledge throughout the project management process.

Summary

A PMO will help accelerate business growth in your business by owning and maintaining the standards used in project management.

PMO benefits will protect the focus of your business and help you achieve the desired goals and implement the outlined business strategies.

Your business gets to benefit from greater innovation, better ways of problem-solving, increased efficiency when it comes to project delivery. Better still, your business will enjoy a reduction in the cost, and the impact of absent resources will be less felt.

Your PMO will make sure you achieve customer satisfaction and ensure your business is flexible and knowledgeable enough to take up new projects by seizing the upcoming opportunities while attaining all the set deliverables!

About the Author

Eugen Spivak is a multi-award-winning author, business strategist, and a business coach. Eugen is the founder of the Canadian Institute of International Business, an organization focused on a better way to learn business!