A project management office (PMO) needs to deliver value to the organisation that it works for. The framework of the PMO Value Ring can help, and the second step is to balance the mix of services your PMO offers.
Before you can look at the mix of services, you first need to define the services your PMO offers, which is step one of completing the PMO Value Ring. Once you have a clear idea of the services your office brings to the business and for which clients, you can start to look at the type of value they offer.
In this article, we’re going to be looking at:
- What it means to balance your PMO’s mix of services
- How you go about balancing the services
- Why it is important to achieve a good balance of services
What is balancing a PMO’s mix of services?
The PMO Value Ring is a way to help you define and demonstrate the value your PMO adds. By balancing the mix of short-, medium-, and long-term value activities, you ensure your office is sustainable in the long term.
You need to make sure that your services do actually provide value. Creating a balance of the mix of services means that when your office may be challenged to show value, or it’s time for a regular review, you have strong value to show.
Focussing only on the short-term value-add, for example, can lead your office to not have a strong overall return on investment. Meanwhile, only paying attention to long-term value can make it difficult to show your wins during a quarterly or half-yearly review.
How do I balance the mix of services in my PMO?
The process of balancing the mix of services in your PMO starts with looking at all the services that your office provides. This is a process you’ll have already completed as the first step of this process.
Working with your defined services, you need to establish whether each offers short-, medium-, or long-term value. You can categorise these through your own knowledge of the process or bring in subject matter experts to help decide the value term.
The next step is to determine the probability of each service being able to deliver the value you expect from it.
Be sure to examine each service to ensure that it’s not detrimental to others. It’s possible for a service with short-term value to have a negative effect in the long-run so you need to take a wide and broad view of every service’s value.
Once you understand the probability of the value being derived from a service, you need to choose a mix of services that will hit your goals over the timeframes you’re working towards. You need to make sure you align with the goals of the business when looking at what timeframes the value needs to be shown over as well.
Why do I need to balance my PMO’s service mix?
As well as doing valuable work, you need to preserve your PMO so you can continue to steer projects in the right direction. It is likely that your office will be called upon to justify its work, so you need to be able to demonstrate value.
This second step in the PMO Value Ring ensures that your office focuses on a range of services that work to show value over time. While your weekly and monthly reporting can help the C-suite make decisions quickly, your work to improve management processes across the business may take a long time to produce measurable results, but they will be worth it.
A strong mix of objectives and timelines will mean the value you add can be consistent. Working towards short-term wins will also keep your team motivated and allow you to make small steps of progress whilst still working towards bigger goals such as better returns on budget.
Balancing your PMO’s mix of services is a solid start to your work on the PMO value ring, and the next step is to define your processes, which we will cover in the next post.
