With the worst of the pandemic hopefully behind us, it’s time for your project management office (PMO) to return to business as usual – of a sort. Most businesses are adopting a hybrid working system, so how can you maintain visibility for your post-COVID hybrid PMO?
However, the age-old problem of keeping your PMO front of mind across the business still remains. We’re going to look at how you can keep your PMO visibility through:
Making your training hybrid-accessible
Offering resources in the way different workers want them
Having your communications heard above the online working noise
How to make your PMO training sessions hybrid working-friendly
Your PMO can be a centre of excellence for management and planning for your business. Offering training and education to the wider business lets, people know what your office does and the positive difference good governance can make.
You need to adapt the training sessions you offer to be accessible to people working from the office or from home. Making this change will keep your offering available to everyone and isn’t just for show.
When offering a classroom training session, you can hold it live for those in the office, live stream it for those at home, and then store it online for on-demand streaming.
You’ll also need to adapt how you tell people about your training. If you once relied on word of mouth or posters in strategic places, this will need to change to email or online noticeboards. Work on relationships with leaders in other business areas so they can communicate your offering verbally, too.
How to make resources available for a hybrid working business
Your PMO has put a lot of work into codifying and streamlining management processes for projects. Much of the work can translate to day-to-day management, so sharing your resources prevents duplication of work across the business.
If your office was still paper-first before the pandemic, odds are you’ve now digitised your processes, procedures, and other documentation. Even if you’ve been online and cloud-based for years, you may want to adapt some of your resource sharing practices.
It’s important to make sure that everyone who might need the tools you have knows they are available. This will strengthen communication and provide guidance on how to use the tools available online and in person.
How to get your PMO communications heard in an online environment
When your PMO and the wider business were primarily based in the office, most communication was done face to face. With the shift to online, lots of business areas will have moved to using online spaces like internal news and blog sites for employees.
Where your PMO case studies may once have been part of a trickle of information available to colleagues, now they could be getting buried by myriad other announcements.
Make your case studies easier to access by making them media-rich. Spend some time on elements like:
Infographics
GIFs
Videos
Quizzes
You can also work with your internal communications team to have a dedicated section of the company website to highlight your PMO case studies. It may also be possible to post your success stories on LinkedIn, for example.
Keeping your PMO visible in a hybrid working environment
As the dust settles and your PMO resets to hybrid working, you need to make sure not to lose sight of previous priorities. Letting the business know the good work your office does will help prevent PMO failure.
Follow our tips to help maintain visibility for your post-COVID hybrid PMO and keep up the excellent work across the wider business.
