Enterprise PPM: The blog site for PPM practitioners and stakeholders across the enterprise

This question was listed as the #1 topic of interest in a Gartner pre-event poll of 2012 PPM & IT Governance Summit attendees with over 70% indicating a “high” or “very high” level of interest.  Business-driven PMOs must first understand this and then clearly communicate the answer to business leadership, PPM and PMO stakeholders and PM practitioners.

In the Ultimate Guide to Business-Driven PMO Success we defined a business-driven PMO as follows. A business-driven PMO enables business change with a business stakeholder value-oriented mindset supported by:

I’ve started to collect a list of benefits to integrating social media with your PPM process and systems infrastructure. I thought I would share what I have right now starting with the more obvious and well understood benefits. I will then move on to the not-so-obvious benefits that organizations are reporting. The exciting thing is that we are in the early days of this phenomenon and that, as this technology becomes more widespread in project-intensive environments, it is likely that some or perhaps most of the really interesting enterprise applications have not yet even been contemplated.

As discussed in a previous blog post, to be successful, most PMOs must have the authority and empowerment that results from support and alignment with key business and IT leadership (See “PMO Critical Success Factors: 6 Alignment Dimensions”, Tuesday, Sep 13, 2011). But, there are exceptions to the rule that success or failure may be pre-determined by your host organization and that you can do everything right but be doomed to failure if you don't have the right level of sponsorship from the start (See “Can your PMO Succeed without Executive-Level Support?”, Friday, Sep 30, 2011).

In a previous blog post, we defined three levels of PPM maturity with respect to business strategy support: strategy alignment, strategy execution and strategy decision support. In this article, I would like to share some recent poll data we collected on where PMOs are along this maturity spectrum.

We recently collected some data on the focus and scope of Project Management Offices (PMOs) that I would like to share. The data was collected as part of the registration process for next week's live Webinar entitled: The Ultimate Guide to Business-Driven PMO Success. The data has not been cross-tabulated with PMO size, industry, tenure or other important PMO attributes, and there is no baseline to understand which way this data is trending. As a result, it's difficult to extrapolate too much from the poll results. However, given that 325 responses have been collected so far, what we do have is a statistically significant snapshot of the current state of affairs for PMOs in general.

Before there were project portfolio management systems, didn't project managers and team members need to share project status, issues, risks and results more directly with each other through old-fashion conference room meetings, water cooler conversations and email for more distributed teams?

The collision of Enterprise PPM and social networking has been inevitable due to the inherently social and collaborative nature of project-centric work. This is exciting because this could unleash immediate and compelling business benefits in terms of improved project team and stakeholder planning, communication, collaboration and cohesiveness that can translate directly in to accelerated strategy, program and project execution.

Successful business-driven PMOs align themselves with the business power-base, business strategy, business metrics, and business process maturity levels. Aligning with the business culture and sub-cultures is another critical success factor for business-driven PMOs whose scope spans diverse project environments across the enterprise. 

There is no shortage of maturity models in the PPM space that are very tactical in nature. From a business alignment perspective it is useful to talk about PMO maturity in terms of three dimensions: Approach, Scope and Impact.