Following on the recent posts covering the topic of PMO Standardisation – a popular topic requested by many of the PM Majik community. This post aims to provide practical ideas and a template on how to capture and identify where there are differences in the core PMO processes.
This is important as before you can standardise PMO processes, you need to know where they are not standardised.
Objective
The objective of this step is to
- Identify all in scope projects / programmes
- Review each of the core processes for each project
- Determine if standard or not
- Capture current state
- Establish plan to standardise
Identify in scope projects / programmes
Before you can start you need identify all of the projects / programmes that are in-scope for the standardise exercise.
This step involves in identifying the list. Hopefully you should already have a central list of active projects. Then it is a simple case of listing each project in the template.
Review each of the core processes for each project
This step is used to identify what PMO processes are being used by each project on the list. This will typically require a meeting to be set up with each project and then systematically asking what process is used for each PMO process.
The information should be captured to allow analysis.
Determine if process is standard
After reviewing each process for a project, it should be possible to determine if there is a process or not. Where there is a process, you need to determine if this follows the required standard.
Obviously, a defined standard must exist in order to determine if the PMO process is standardised.
At the simplest level, each PMO process for a project will be one of the following:
- No process exists
- Process exists but not standardised
- Standardised process
- Not applicable (N/A)
Capture current state
As the information is captured, it is important that it is recorded. This is where using a simple template is beneficial.
All that is needed is a simple 1 page dashboard that lists core PMO processes along the x axis and the in-scope projects on the y axis.
This will then allow the status of each PMO process for each project to be recorded. Use of colour coding will result in a heatmap so it is easy to see areas needing attention.
Establish plan to standardise
Now that you have a good view on the current state, you can see the areas requiring attention. This means you can select the area you wish to focus on i.e. Reporting and create a plan on how to standardise across the projects.
The dashboard can be used to track progress.
PMO Standardisation Template
To help accelerate the process, a copy of the PMO standardisation template used for this article is available as a free download. Simply click the link below.
PMO Standardisation Presentation
Summary
In order to standardise PMO processes you need to know where they are not standard. These 5 steps together with this easy to use template will allow you to quickly establish and execute a standardisation review.
