After you’ve decided to raise awareness of your project management office (PMO), you then need to choose the right tools for your PMO communication methods. It’s important that people across your business, and sometimes wider industry, know what your PMO is doing.
There are plenty of reasons for raising awareness of your PMO, which we’ve already discussed. Now you understand the benefits of telling people about your office and its work, you need to choose what tools are going to help you.
It all will depend on the goal of your PMO communication and who you want to be communicating with. With that in mind, we’ll be looking at:
- The tools you can use to inform your intended audience
- How you pick the right tools to persuade people
- What methods you can use to engage the business in your PMO activities
What are the best tools to inform people about my PMO?
Providing information is one of the basic functions of any communication. If you’ve ran a survey and found that not many people in your organisation know what a PMO is or what it does, you need to start out with informative communication.
Different offices will perform different functions, so you need to decided exactly what information you need to be giving. Do you want people in the business to know what you’ve achieved? Is it more important they understand the services you offer?
Consider using the following tools to provide information:
- A blogis a useful way to provide information in long form. Well written blogs will provide useful details and be easy to take away key messages. They are also stored indefinitely so can be referred back to in the future.
- Videos are very effective and getting across a lot of information in a clear and succinct way. It’s also easy for people to retain information provided in videos since it’s a mix of audio and visual content.
- Infographicsare an effective way to provide data from different areas to tell a story. You can make information accessible and easy to follow with infographics that are well put together.
What tools will help me persuade people about my PMO?
First, consider what you want to persuade your audience about. There are lots of different reasons you may need to “sell” your PMO, such as:
- Affirming your value to the C-suite
- Gaining buy-in from different business areas for a project
- Convincing stakeholders about your ability to deliver
Persuading people to buy-in to your PMO requires careful planning of your message. Understand what’s important to your audience and decide what to say. In terms of how to say it, data driven decisions are usually the most effective.
Present your data in the form of infographics to make it more interesting. As we noted earlier, infographics tell a story. Produce an infographic about the different values that you add to the business or the timeline of your project delivery.
Data visualisations can be invaluable to people with technical knowledge, like your board-level sponsor. Create a dashboard to explain how your PMO is meeting and exceeding KPIs that can be monitored to persuade people of the effectiveness of your operations.
A video can be used to present information in the form of a pitch. It will work well with external stakeholders who are looking to be impressed at what your PMO can do.
What communication tools can my PMO use to increase engagement?
Having people engage with your PMO will drive its success. You will be able to learn what people in your business want or are interested in and you’ll create a valuable feedback loop.
Here are some tools you can use that come with simple measures for engagement.
Social media
Tools like a Facebook page or LinkedIn for your PMO allow you to see how many people interact with your content. Comments are invaluable to get feedback and understand the type of content that people enjoy.
Messaging apps
Having a Slack channel in your business for your PMO can help invite feedback and allow people across the company to ask questions. Broadcasting messages across a WhatsApp group or holding Zoom conferences are also useful. Attendance and read rates are useful measures.
Videos
Use data from your other engagement tools to understand what video content may be well received. Host it on a private channel on YouTube and you’ll get a range of useful analytics for engagement.
The take home
The right tools for your PMO communication efforts will depend on what you want to say. Understand the different type of message you can deliver and choose an effective medium of delivery.
